


Forewarned

by SMJB



Series: Forewarned Canon [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Alternian Invasion, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Crossover, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Historical, Canon Compliant, Feels, Gen, Lore - Freeform, Troll Biology (Homestuck), honorable mentions to Ms. Paint the Condesce and John's Dad who are seen but never speak in this fic, rosemary is actually the closest thing this fic has to a "central" ship IMO, ships listed by when they become plot relevant and characters listed by first speaking role
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-01-05 22:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 26,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21215771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: When our heroes first step foot on Earth C they learn that their lives have been documented in a certain webcomic--and, more to the point, so have their futures. After having learned what their nightmare scenario is, can they avert it...or will this horrible knowledge just make things even worse between them? And that's not even getting into the fandom. Join our heroes as they struggle to either talk about their feelings or else use what they've learned about the apparent nature of the universe to bend reality to their will--whichever one ends up being the easiest path to a better future, really.





	1. Chapter 0

AH: Appear in this fanfic. 

You retire to [your heavily processed photograph of Andrew Carnegie’s study, painstakingly retrieved from a google image search](https://www.homestuck.com/story/3231), and immediately realize something’s wrong. 

“Oh shit. Someone’s narrating me. I’m in someone’s shitty fanfic!” you say, being a complete baby about this whole situation.

“‘Baby’???” you object to my characterization. “Stop this ridiculous characterization right this instant! Doesn’t the real me love fan content, or some such nonsense?”

While this would appear to be the case, I would also assume the real Andrew Hussie would also never  [propose to a thirteen year old girl](https://www.homestuck.com/story/4815), so I mean.... 

“Could you please stop linking to things in the text? It’s giving me a headache.”

No.

You sit back in your chair, running a hand through your hair with an air of defeat. “Stop narrating me. Alright, I’m clearly not going to be allowed to leave until I’ve done whatever it is that you need me to do. So what is it?”

I need you to metaphorically kick off the events of this plot in an allegory for how your comic and its epilogues are responsible for the creation of this fic. And by “metaphorically” I mean literally.

“Oh, I get it. Mr. I’m-Too-Good-To-Have-An-Author-Insert needs an Act of God, so he’s coming to the OG source.”

Look, arguing with my imaginary friends isn’t really my thing, so how about we just get on with it? By which I mean, how about  _ I _ just get on with telling you what you do, because you’re not real, based on a real person though you might be. 

“Catty,” you say, because I allow you to, nae, because I  _ make  _ you, in order to preserve the illusion for the audience that this is a dialogue rather than a monologue, and then you sit up in your chair and type the following message:

Hey, assholes! This is highly relevant to your interests.  
<https://www.homestuck.com/>  
PS: Don’t try to contact me.

You then send this email off to the relevant parties.

“Right; it’s been sent to  _all _ relevant parties.”

What do you--? Elsewhere in space and time and some other dimensions, everyone who goes from the Alpha Session to Earth C--every last carapacian and consort--gets the email. Would you believe that I am honestly annoyed by that and didn’t see it coming?

“Hee hee.”

Well, I didn’t when it happened in the first draft of this story, at least. And while I could simply go back and make my instructions more clear, I don’t think I will; there’s something very Homestuck about an author being outsmarted by their own creations, after all.

“Don’t patronize me.”

Hey, I bear you no ill will for that whatsoever.

Unrelatedly, you now drop kick your typewriter into the void. After all, I did use the word “literally” when I said you were going to kick things off, if you recall.

“Hey! Do you have any idea how expensive that piece of shit is?”

Don’t worry about it, you’re not going to need it. This is your only appearance in this story.

“Thank God.”

And with that, the scene fades to black, your part in this story concluded.

“Wait. What’s going to happen to me  _ now?_” 

...Fade to black.


	2. Chapter 1

Jane Crocker felt dazed by the epilogues. She told herself it was hogwash, but it still shook her--and the treachery of her elder selves didn’t help. She needed air. On the way out of the house she spotted a book. A familiar book. Dirk’s reimagining of  [Detective Pony](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2427119/chapters/5371283). She grabbed it on the way out the door so that she could have something to read. 

The world was still brand new, still raw. In the distance a power plant was being built by imperial drones--for the time being everything was powered by alchemized hubs copied from the one Rose took from Skaianet Labs, but while their grist supply was large, it wasn’t infinite. They wanted to get to the point where they could reserve it for emergencies. Or at least, Jane did; it suddenly occurred to her that they’d never actually discussed it. In a way she couldn’t find the words to describe, this realization struck her as ominous, lending some ineffable weight to those slanderous epilogues in some way that was beyond her conscious ken.

She shook herself.

She found a log pretending to be a bench in what would one day be a park according to the current round of social planning, sat on it, and began reading her book. A nice, pleasant read was what she needed.

A nice, pleasant read is not what she got; by the time she had finished the book, she was shaking. Jesus fucking Christ, how had she not remembered it was like that? No, that statement wasn’t entirely accurate--she had remembered what it was like, it was just that the Epilogues had put it in a stark new light. It was disturbing how well the picture of Dirk he himself painted here meshed with how he was portrayed in the epilogues, shaking her conviction in their inherent fakeness attribute to the core.

But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that she had read this book a million times, and never once suspected it was anything other than a joke. Until now.

The whole situation reminded her of  _ Homestuck _ itself--it was reminiscent of the way the comic would present, say, Dave’s abuse at the hands of his Bro as a joke, only to reveal far later that, surprise motherfucker, it wasn’t a joke, it had never  _ been  _ a joke, this kid was being deeply traumatized while you sat there and watched, and you should be ashamed of yourself for laughing at it.

Jesus fuck this was a dark train of thought. She called Dirk.

~ ~ ~ 

Dave knocked on the door to Dirk’s machinist shop. “Yo, you doing alright?” 

“Pretty good, considering that I’m destined to become a supervillain and all.” 

“Says who? Seriously, we need to all get on the same page of not giving a shit about that lousy ass Johnrezi sadfic, and look, even if we were to take it at face value...like...what’d be the point of sending it to us if we couldn’t do anything about it?” 

“To make us suffer, of course. What about anything that’s happened in your entire life has lead you to believe the universe doesn’t hate all of us personally?” 

“Not saying you’re wrong about the universe hating us personally, but it’s clearly not our future. I mean come on, you’d think that someone at some point would say ‘Man, this is exactly like what happened in that trashy ass Johnrezi fic we all read once upon a time--and how did we all collectively forget about that long enough for Jane to be elected president, anyway?’ Furthermore, all we know about that...thing...is that someone wrote it. There are literally authors credited and shit. It’s literally labeled ‘tales of dubious authenticity.’ We’re getting twisted up over nothing--which reminds me, I intend to _prove _it’s all bullshit, by the way.” 

“If that’s the case the author knows me very well, because that shit I did...all of it tracks.”

“Dude,” Dave said softly. “Come on, man. You’re not an anime villain.”

Dirk stared out a window, at the not even remotely tonally appropriate mildly overcast noon sky. “If there well and truly needs to be a villain for reality to continue existing, who better to fill that role than me? After all, if I can’t be loved, I can at least be useful.”

Dave stared at him. When he spoke, honest to God, his voice cracked. “You’re loved.”

Dirk said nothing.

Dave continued. “You’re loved. Look, we’re a bunch of horribly mentally scarred teenage dipshit recovering from growing up in a dozen different unique versions of hell so going around professing how much we all love one another isn’t really our  _ thing _ , but you  _ are _ loved. The truth is you’re pretty amazing dude.”

“I know I’m useful,” Dirk said wryly.

“That’s not what I--you know what? When Jade and Karkat and I go find the ruins of Washington DC to confirm the lack of a transportalizer in the White House, you’re coming with us and we will bond like the goddamn family we are. When we’re not busting our asses sifting through the ruins of a lost civilization we will watch terrible goddamn movies together--my hand to God, I will find something even Jake English would turn his nose up at--and it will be awesome.

“The thing that is  _ not _ going to happen is you being allowed to isolate yourself and stew in your own self loathing for so long that offering yourself up as a human sacrifice to the shitty gods of narrative contrivance seems like a good use of your life.”

“God damn it, Dave, I’ve got things to do.”

“No you don’t; we scavenged those imperial drones from the Condesce’s ship for a reason, and that reason was  _ specifically  _ so that we can just loaf like a bunch of useless asswhipes while they build all the infrastructure and shit for our shining new civilization.”

Dirk’s phone rang, and he hit answer. It defaulted to speaker mode, as he was generally using his hands to build or break stuff when people were calling him. “Hi, Jane.”

“Dirk I’m a terrible friend and I’m sorry.”

“God damn it am I the only one not getting bent out of shape over some rando’s Johnrezi sadfic?” Dave demanded.

“Huh? Oh, you mean the epilogues. No, I was able to dismiss that as Leftist propaganda. Well, I had been, until I read  [Detective Pony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEqJ96p4CXY&list=PLQ8hhddV_CO3MPToD4TCoo4eKFqeQTk9l) again, and...

“...Jesus Christ, how did I not notice that this thing was one giant cry for help? You literally have a character seize control of the narrative, verbally bitch slap you into submission with a list of all your flaws, and attempt to get her to behead your self-insert. And then in spite of claiming in text that you didn’t want me to see this you sent it to me anyway? Well, okay, that  _ last  _ part contributed to my thinking it was all a joke, to be fair...but it wasn’t a joke, was it?”

“...I’ve got to go.” Dirk said, dropping his phone and flying the fuck out of there in a blind panic. 

Dave watched Dirk flip the fuck out and fly out of there like a greased weasel being shot out of a circus cannon. “Well, shit,” he said.

“What happened?” Jane asked.

“Dirk flipped the fuck out and flew out of here like a greased weasel being shot out of a circus cannon,” Dave said.

“Are you going to go after him?”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to find him if he doesn’t want to be found, and besides, he maybe needs a minute to deal with all this on his own.

“So.  _ You  _ down for taking a road trip to Washington DC to disprove this Epilogue business once and for all?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first [Detective Pony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY4Mxp0g4M8) link is to the fanfic, the second is to the the official audio version of the fanfic. <s>When the movie comes out I will link that here, too.</s> It is done.
> 
> Also I took a crash course in CSS yesterday in order to make this fic visually pop the way I want it too and have been messing with Chapter 0 ever since, so it might be worth going back and seeing if the version you remember is the same as the current one. I'm still getting the hang of this system, so such will likely continue as the story progresses.


	3. Chapter 2

John Egbert didn’t know what to feel or believe. To learn that their lives were fictionalized in the webcomic Homestuck was one thing, but the thing was, the story didn’t end at the present, and the Homestuck Epilogues painted a grim picture of their future.

There were many opinions about what, exactly, the nature of the epilogues were, of course--indeed, what the nature of Homestuck itself was. It was weirdly metafictional for something so clearly biographical, and the disturbing thing was that the very metafictional elements made their story make more sense, and while no one was of the opinion that they were _ literally _fictional characters in a web comic, Rose hypothesized that there was a deeper metaphysical connection than one of mere record keeping. 

“The Law of Similarity in Hermetic magic states that the map is the territory. The effigy is the thing. This is the principle upon which voodoo dolls work, and I believe that something similar is going on here--in the same sense that the voodoo doll _ is _ the intended victim, Homestuck _ is _ our lives,” she had explained.

According to Terezi, this tracked, and while Kanaya didn’t know anything about the metaphysical mumbo jumbo (not her exact words), she hadn’t seen anything that struck her as particularly implausible and trusted Rose’s judgement in any case. Jasprose agreed with Rose, naturally enough.

Dave had the opposite opinion, particularly of the epilogues, declaring loudly and frequently that they were all “getting worked up over someone’s shitty Johnrezi sadfic.” He was supported in this by Karkat, Jade, Roxy, Calliope (who was probably just agreeing with Roxy, let’s be honest), Jane, and her dad.

Though oddly enough, not the Nannasprites; while they stressed that their life was different from Jane’s and so it shouldn’t be taken as proof one way or the other, they could in fact see themselves in Candy!Jane’s shoes had their life taken a dark turn.

This left Jake, who was nowhere to be found, Dirk, who was uncharacteristically reticent to offer opinions on anything these days, and John. (Well, that and a bunch of chess guys and consorts, but they had neither the technical knowledge nor the personal insight into their characters for their opinions to be worth anything.) And John didn’t know. It was all so confusing!

(It turns out, _ anything _can be confusing if you just refuse to think about it.)

Little wonder, then, that John had jumped when he had gotten that message from his future self. A trans-temporal treasure hunt beat wrestling with difficult concepts any day. Speaking of which, John checked his phone’s GPS (having Jade around made building satellite networks a cinch) to confirm that he hadn’t wandered off the path. No, he was still headed towards the coordinates. He could have flown, of course, but then it wouldn’t be much of a treasure hunt, would it? 

He stepped into a clearing and it suddenly became readily apparent that he had not been sent to find treasure (in retrospect, it had been a stupid assumption). He spotted Terezi, sat with her back against a tree, crying, and he felt something tighten in his chest. Resolve. An internal debate he wasn’t even aware that he was having with himself quieted itself and myriad potential futures narrowed down to a single path. _ Roxy doesn’t need you; Terezi does. _ (He didn’t have the self-reflection necessary to wonder why he’d brought Roxy up apropos of nothing, sadly.)

“Hey, Terezi--”

Suddenly she was pinning him to a tree, her cane pressed into his throat.

“You _ will _ get her, John. When you go back into the medium three sweeps from now you will avoid getting chomped on by Lord English and you will save Vriska and you will bring her _ here _. To this very moment. Do you understand me, John?”

“O-Of course,” John said.

Terezi seemed to realize that she had John pressed against a tree with her body, and backed away. She sat at the foot of another tree. John casually slinked down the tree he was at and sat there, looking at her.

“I want to talk.”

“Red or black?” Terezi asked.

“Wow, you really cut to the chase, you know that?” She said nothing in response to this, so he continued. “I don’t know. Candy!John was right when he said the sort of arrangement you were talking about didn’t sound like a bad one, but Meat!John might have also been right when he said that humans don’t really do pitch feelings.”

“Or maybe Dirk was manipulating you, under the mistaken impression that losing a red lover would hurt me more than a black one. Humans tend to be oddly dense about the quadrants.”

“_ I _ certainly am,” John agreed.

“And to be fair, the lines can be blurry even at the best of times,” Terezi continued. “It’s not like matesprits never fight, kismeses never comfort one another, or moirails never fuck. It’s got to be even more confusing with weird alien chemicals running through your brain. But maybe we’re making this more complicated than it needs to be.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that relationships, by which I mean _ any _mutualistic relationship be it romantic or platonic or anything else, all boil down to one thing: making yourselves and each other stronger.”

“Jeez, not everything is about combat, Terezi.”

“I wasn’t talking about _ physical _strength, you dunce.”

“Oh.”

“Not necessarily, at least. The important thing about any relationship is that we’re getting what we need from it, and giving the other person what they need from it. Which in turn requires being honest about what we need. So long as that’s what’s happening, perhaps we can figure out what to call it later.”

John’s mouth dried out. “I--yeah--that sounds--”

Terezi’s phone buzzed. She looked at her new message. “It’s Vriska! You actually did it, John!” She actually, uncharacteristically, hugged him.

As he was breathing in her musk (she didn’t use deodorant), John could suddenly piece together exactly how it was that he had gotten a message from himself, and why his future self had lead him here. And more amazing than the fact that he’d been lead here by the hand of fate, which itself had its scales weighed down by his own thumbs, was that he knew exactly what to say. Hell, it was even suave. “Of course I did. Er, will. She is the most important person in your life, and you are the most important person in mine.”

A look passed over Terezi’s face, and at last she said, “Let me deal with this real quick.”

She read something on her phone and muttered something that sounded like “Surrounded by a bunch of smooth motherfuckers today,” then called.

“I’m not breaking up with you, but before we can talk for real you need to do something…. Have you gotten a link to a webcomic called _ Homestuck _ yet?... Good. Read it, including the epilogues. Bye.” And she hung up.

“Ouch,” John said.

“She needs to know what I know before we can figure out where we stand,” Terezi said. Then she grinned, showing off sharklike teeth. “Speaking of figuring out where _we_ stand, that line was positively _ inspired_, John. I could almost believe that you’re not a virgin.” She stood, brushed some leaves off her pants, and offered him her hand.

He took it. “Ah, thanks...I think.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do have a couple of thoughts on this chapter, actually.
> 
> For one thing, this and Chapter 1 were originally in reverse order, but I felt this way around fit better thematically (e.g., didn't seem to promise that this was a Johnrezi fic when these guys are more or less in the background from here on out). The events of these two chapters are happening more or less simultaneously, it was really arbitrary either way.
> 
> Also, it was a real headache rearranging my character tags (which are in order of first *spoken* line, after all) when I decided that John's flashback to Rose speaking here counted as Rose speaking. Going off on that tangent, I am seriously considering adding Ms. Paint, the Condesce, and John's dad to the tags. They've been left out because they don't speak, but it's hard to argue that John's dad (and hell, even Ms. Paint) isn't more relevant to the plot than Rufioh and Porrim.
> 
> Speaking of going back and changing things, unsurprisingly I have continued to go back and play with the CSS code and will likely continue to do so. Maybe I'll add a picture to the prologue in order to render it properly in the Homestuck style--in which case, the question becomes do I make my own or do I just lift one of the ones of Hussie in his study already on the site? Only time will tell.


	4. Chapter 3

“Hey, it’s me.”

“How’d you get this number?” Jasprose asked.

“Come on, you know I know everything Dave knows,” Davepeta said. “Well, _can_ know _any_thing he knows if I want; I’ve still got to root around in the Ultimate Dave to find it. But you know what I mean.”

“What do you want?”

“Well, I just finished reading the Epilogues.”

“Couldn’t you have also absorbed that knowledge from Dave?”

“Yeah, but Aradia, Sollux, and Vwiskers couldn’t, and so I did it in real time like an analogue plebe out of solidarity. And Sollux needed to have it read to him because he’s blind, and it all devolved into this whole MST3K thing. You should have seen it.”

“Fascinating, Davepeta.”

“As I was saying I just read the Epurrlogues, and based on my access to Dave’s memories, Nepeta’s expertise, and basic fucking common sense, I suspect that this all went off like a nuclear bomb. This has the potential to shatter our furriend group which is bad because, as is all but spelled out word for word in the canonical text itself, that’s the exact thing that causes efurrything to go to shit in the first place.” Davepeta paused, considering. “Well, that and the fact that giving a bunch of dumbass kids ultimate power and telling them to build a utopia is a recipe for disaster even at the best of times. But between you and me we have access to the accumulated wisdom of the ultimate selves of three people and a cat--_surely_ we can police this situation.”

“So basically what you’re saying to me is that you want us to access our ultimate selves and seize control of the narrative,” Jasprose said. “Where have I heard that before?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m just talking about organizing some group therapy and shit.”

“Huh. For some reason I thought you were talking about, like, clandestinely going around and manipulating them into hooking up.”

“You are clearly your father’s daughter.”

Jasprose ignored their comment. “I can’t imagine everyone going ‘Open up about my deepest feelings to my entire social circle? Sure, why not.’ And, well, Rose is self-taught. We’re not exactly state certified.”

“But through her ultimate self you have access to versions of her that didn’t play SBURB and _are_ state certified, don’t you?”

“I mean, probably.”

Davepeta clapped. “There you are, then! Now, then, convincing people to do this will be tricky, but I have an idea.”

“Before you do anything that depends on me knowing what the fuck I’m talking about _vis-a-vis_ psychology, I should probably confirm that there is a version of myself that does so. For all I know at this point, this was a childhood fad I’d have grown out of, given enough time. Maybe adult me hates psychologists.”

“Good point call me when you’re ready. Meow!”

“‘Meow’?”

“‘Ciao.’”

“I see. Bye,” and Jasprose hung up.

Well, then. How was she going to go about this? Eventually, she decided that KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) was the best policy: she gathered a pile of pillows and sunk into them, closing her eyes and concentrating on the paths not taken, allowing herself to sink into the sea of the Ultimate Self....

~ ~ ~

Once upon a time [two universes were destroyed](https://www.homestuck.com/story/4109). That curt statement doesn’t do the event justice, but then, could _anything_ that can be said in the English language do so? The answer is no. That would imply it is possible for the human brain to comprehend the sheer scope of what’s going on, which it can’t. Human beings are so very tiny in the grand scale of things, and even if I were inclined to crunch the numbers involved in this, they would mean nothing to you; the scale would roll off of your mind like water off of a duck. 

More important than the scale is the ramifications. Clean little descriptors make things sound clean and orderly--but you very much can not murder a universe ahead of its time in a manner that is clean or orderly. Bilious Slick was simultaneously the universe and a living thing, and the thing about living things is that when you tear them into mincemeat with combat tentacles or stick a bomb inside them and blow them up, you tend to get viscera _everywhere_. And Bilious Slick’s viscera is spacetime itself. 

All this viscera would be pulled into the Green Sun in time by the strength of its gravity, like the debris kicked up by the Chicxulub impact reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and friction heating it to flash fry the dinosaurs--but for a time, inasmuch as “time” means anything in this context, the Green Sun had a ring composed of bits of the two universes...and, from time to time, these bits would collide. 

If there were people in the packets of spacetime, troll or human or some innocent race who had nothing to do with the destruction of their universe, they would certainly be surprised by the result of a collision with another packet. Likely, they would spend their entire short existence--the equivalent of a cell that hadn’t realized the body is dead yet--wondering why the universe suddenly rearranged itself that one time, or at least until the fact that it was ever any different faded from memory in a few centuries or millennia (“short” is an extremely relative term in the lifespan of a universe).

One particular collision brought Earth and Alternia into contact--but not just any Earth and any Alternia, this combination was truly one that was one in a...well, an unthinkably high number. For the Earth was the Earth of Rose of her friends, and the Alternia was the Alternia of Kanaya and her friends, almost perfectly synced up relative to their ages.

This was almost certainly an example of the principle that an infinite number of chimpanzees typing away at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinitely long time will eventually crap out the entire works of Shakespeare by sheer chance, and not a trap that was knowingly set up to capture Jasprose’s consciousness. But be it a deliberate trap or not it was a perfectly designed one, for though she hid it well Jasprose was a very sad and lonely girl. Jasprose had lost her Kanaya, and then died, and then been robbed of whatever reunion she might have had with her in the afterlife by being brought back, and then merged with her cat, and then robbed of her rebound when Davesprite merged with Nepetasprite to form Davepeta. At the end of the day, she was merely flesh and blood, or whatever sprites are made of; couldn’t she just _have_ this? Couldn’t she just lose herself and live vicariously through _this_ Rose, who had both a living mom _and_ a living Kanaya, and never had the fate of existence in her hands to fumble? She felt her own memories slip away as she became entwined with the memories of this version of herself.... 

==>

Your name is ROSE LALONDE and you live a fairly normal life. Your MOM is part of the HAWKING INITIATIVE, an international/interplanetary agency located in Seatle with the remit of figuring out just what the fuck happened to make the stars go away (conclusions: the human and troll universes--that they come from two different ones has been confirmed by readings of the strong and weak nuclear forces on Earth and Alternia--collided, destroying both in a Big Crunch scenario and jettisoning their respective star systems as interdimensional flotsam), whether there’s any danger (conclusions: yes), and what can be done about it (conclusions: IDK, find some way to drive this pocket dimension?), which means you moved to the quiet suburb of Maple Valley when you were young. 

(Okay, so maybe your life isn’t _that_ normal.) 

Your friends JADE, whose GRANDPA is also part of the Initiative, and DAVE, whose BRO is head of security, have similar stories, but JOHN is a native; your OTHER FRIENDS are not natives of this planet, northwestern Washington being a popular place for troll settlement what with there being trolls already working at the aforementioned Hawking Initiative and all. Oddly, in spite of you all living in the same town, you met all of your friends online. 

You have a number of INTERESTS, including PSYCHOLOGY, the ZOOLOGICALLY DUBIOUS, KNITTING, WIZARDS, and MIXED MARTIAL ARTS, most of which ought to help you with your AMBITION to get in on the ground floor of the brand new field of troll/human comparative psychology before all the LOW-HANGING FRUIT have been plucked. You always used to tell yourself that this ambition was the reason for your lifelong fascination with trolls, but it turns out in point of fact that you are also A HUGE LESBIAN.

What will you do?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm rather proud of "(conclusions: yes)". See, I originally went into detail about what sorts of dangers they thought they might be in (some not too distant from the truth), and then realized that that was far too much exposition to be getting into in this manner--but there's something amusing about just saying "yes" and refusing to go into it instead. Maybe it's only because I know what's hiding behind that "yes" that it's funny, though. What do you think?


	5. Chapter 4

Vriska awoke slowly, and then all at once, springing to her feet. She stared at the clearing around her and the people in it. “Where the hell am I?”

“Earth C, apparently,” Davepeta said. 

“How did I get here?”

“You deployed the weapon and immediately got concussed by a fragment of reality like a total chump,” Sollux informed her.

“Wh8t????????” Wow, she must be really distressed by this if her quirk is breaking through into this format.

“We were there for most of the battle and also most of Ju--I mean, future!John’s retcon things and so could explain it to you in excruciating detail, but the short of it is that you were floating up into the black hole, but then they showed up and grabbed you,” Aradia said. 

Whether because of the news or the continuing effects of the concussion, Vriska felt dizzy. This couldn’t be the conclusion of her arc, could it? Surely not. She noticed [the message](https://www.homestuck.com/story/7939) from Terezi again, and with nothing better to do, she read it.

It was just too much, on top of everything else. It was like the universe was punishing her for her hubris, first stripping her of all relevance and then doing her how she did (Vriska). She couldn’t...just couldn’t. In a fit of raw emotion, she began to type:

_Terezi!!!!!!!! I got your messages and...no. That’s all I’ve got,cuz there 8n’t enough capital letters, exclamation points, or 8s in the W8RLD to accurately describe how much “no” I feel right now. How is it possible for you to be so very, very wrong a8out practically everything???????? You’re the Seer of Mind, for Gog’s sake! Pity you? PITY YOU???????? I 8NV8 you!!!!!!!! Do you have ANY idea how important you are? I don’t even mean important *to me*--I mean that you are so effortlessly relevant that it is awe inspiring the way you. Just. Wrap causality itself around your little finger and 8end the universe to your will like it ain’t no thing. That thing I just said wasn’t even gramatical and I don’t care--just, please don’t br8k up with me. I know I’ve been a lousy girlfriend--I must have if you feel this way--8ut...I don’t even know how to finish this sentence. I’ve 8een staring at this 8linking cursor for MINUTES, desperately trying to think of a reason that you shouldn’t, and all I can think of is...please? I’ll do 8etter, I promise. Fucking Hell, I sound like my ghost and I h8 it. Can we at LEAST discuss this in person?_

__

Almost immediately Vriska’s phone rang, and Vriska’s heart lept.

__

“Terezi!” she answered.

__

“I’m not breaking up with you, but before we can talk for real you need to do something,” Terezi said.

__

“Anything! What do you want?”

__

“Have you gotten a link to a webcomic called _Homestuck_ yet?”

__

“What?” Vriska checked her phone and realized that she’d gotten a new message from an unknown number. It read:

__

_Hey, assholes! This is highly relevant to your interests._

__

_ [www.homestuck.com](https://www.homestuck.com) _

__

_PS: Don’t try to contact me._

__

“Yeah, I guess--”

__

“Good. Read it, including the epilogues. Bye.” And with that cryptic message, Terezi hung up.

__

As the reader is no doubt well aware (and if you’re not, um, this is a weird way for you to be introduced to the fandom, but hi), one does not simply read _Homestuck_ in an afternoon--especially not when one of your party needed it to be read to him, a production which naturally turned into a dramatic reading and from there into a MSTing.

__

But due to Vriska’s insistence that they spend every waking moment on it that wasn’t spent on various necessities (eating, finding adequate housing, etc.) they managed it in a fortnight. It was actually fun.

__

Vriska herself found the epilogues less fun. They read Candy first, and Vriska was a bit uncomfortable reading John and Terezi’s budding kismesitude. She wasn’t jealous--Terezi had four quadrants, after all--but she’d rather not have had her face rubbed in it like that. And then her own arrival with its implication that glory had been robbed from her in this timeline, too, followed immediately by her own love confession for Terezi and realization of why she had lashed out at her ghost so made it suddenly very uncomfortable.

__

Having that in the back of her mind soured whatever enjoyment Vriska could have gotten from Meat. The others didn’t seem to notice that she’d more or less stopped riffing on the epilogues with them.

__

“‘She and another Vriska ghost finally found each other,’” Aradia read, in her best Terezi voice. “‘It made me so happy getting to feel that, as if it was one of my own memories. It just reinforced the feeling that there was something special between us. And I just kept hanging on to that belief, right up until...oh, I don’t know...now???’”

__

Oof. Way to stick the knife in, Meat 21. 

__

“He he he. They’re going to _fuuuuck_,” Sollux commented.

__

Vriska stared daggers at him that he couldn’t see.

__

As the chapter drew on, to Vriska’s growing horror, it seemed that he was right--that the universe was going to force her to witness her girlfriend having sex with John fucking Egbert, as though it hadn’t punished her for her hubris enough.

__

Mercifully the narrative panned to the sky just in time to spare her that, but as it turned out that was just to get her to lower her guard for something much, much worse; Meat 35 revealed that John Egbert’s own feelings weren’t quite as black as they appeared, and the _bastard_ had the _absolute fucking gall_ to die in the middle of a love confession!!!!!!!!

__

Vriska’s companions on this journey gave her pitying looks at this moment.

__

“Let’s just finish this,” she managed to get out through gritted teeth.

__

Some more stuff happened, but most of it wasn’t Terezi-related, so she didn’t care.

__

The second it was over Vriska was flying out the window and calling Terezi.

__

“I finished _Homestuck_, can we talk now?” Vriska asked.

__

“Sure. I’m at John’s place; let me just kick him out.”

__

On the one hand that “sure” was a good sign, but given what she’d just read the fact that she was that comfortable in his space was not, so Vriska’s emotional state was...mixed.

__

“John’s place? I see. What...what quadrant are you guys in?”

__

“Black, sort of.”

__

Well thank fuck. But… “What does ‘sort of’ mean?”

__

“It means he has no cultural context for a black relationship, which forces me to reexamine my own preconceived notions about it, and doing so makes me wonder if, at the raw psychological core of troll romance whether there’s four distinct sets of impulses or if there’s one set of impulses being contextualized in four different ways, or somewhere in between--and whether or not the difference actually means anything, practically speaking. Is it possible that the quadrant system is simply a highly regimented form of polyamory and that we’d be healthier as a society if we subscribed to a less structured version? It raises all sorts of questions.”

__

“...Okay, but, like, you guys _are_ black, right?”

__

“Yes, Vriska, we’re black.”

__

“Oh thank Gog.”

__

“Well that’s rather presumptuous.”

__

Vriska’s heart sank. “You mean...you don’t want to…?” She had been so sure based on what she’d read, but then, that had been a different timeline, and Terezi had John now….

__

“Relax, I’m just giving you a hard time.”

__

Vriska literally clutched at her chest. “That was cruel, Terezi! And frankly, so was making me read all that trash before deigning to talk to me like a real person.”

__

“Yeah, well, consider it revenge for fucking off to the middle of nowhere to have your ultimate battle with Lord English without having any way of returning to us. Also, it wouldn’t have been fair to start this new phase of our relationship when I knew so much that you didn’t.”

__

“New phase?”

__

“Matespritship, dummy! At least I assume that’s what you were getting at with all this talk about what quadrant I was in with John. You weren’t asking about _him_, were you?”

__

“Oh God no! Never say or think that again.”

__

“That was a strong reaction. Want to talk about it?”

__

“...Huh, I guess it was? Weird. And not particularly, firstly because that’s all I really have to say on the matter, and secondly because our first real conversation in fuck knows how long will _not_ be about John fucking Egbert. I _refuse_ to allow it.”

__

“Fair enough. Just give me a second to get rid of him, and we can talk face-to-face.”

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, if anyone actually tackles Sollux, Aradia, Vriska and Davepeta MST'ing Homestuck and I like your take on it, I will link it here and make it an official part of Forewarned Canon. I have no intention of doing it myself because Homestuck is long, but I'd love to have it.
> 
> I made Vriska's response to Terezi's message as raw as possible by taking a single stab at it and refusing to update it no matter how many drafts this chapter went through.
> 
> Vriska having a strong negative reaction to the idea of dating John and not knowing why, in spite of the fact that she (or at least another her) has done so before is brought to you by the lesbian reading of her character. To me there's only one hiccup in this theory--her crush on Nic Cage--and it's so random and stupid that someone not obsessed with every random minutia of Homestuck lore could easily pave over it. (As for me, I've been meaning to watch Con Air to see whom in the cast Cameron Poe could be serving as a stand-in for for a while. Or hell, maybe he's just a good dad--that seems like the sort of thing that'd get Vriska to feel a sort of way she could mistake for romantic attraction.)
> 
> Also, I know exactly what Future!"John" did because it was in one of the drafts, but have elected not to publish it, in the grand Homestuck tradition of making you figure out the really important things from context.


	6. Chapter 5

“Everyone’s always talking about how eerily accurate that thing was but what about all the things it got wrong? Like what about how on page 386 John calls my bro a White rapper? Hey Dirk, you’re not White, are you? Like you didn’t go the whole Michael Jackson route while I wasn’t looking, right?” Dave said.

“He always claimed to be Peurto Rican, right? I’ve never been able to pin an ethnicity down myself due to the fact that the industrialized genetic soup I always assumed I spawned from would have sampled from all around the world, so I just took it at face value that I was just ambiguously brown,” Dirk said.

“That is at best tangentially related to what I’m talking about, my dude.”

“I know that, but like..._am_ I Peurto Rican? Or at least Mestizo? Is Roxy genetically an Ethiopian Jew just because that’s who raised her in your universe? Just how closely did SBURB make our genetics match the people’s whose nests it layed us in like a transdimensional cuckoo? On the other hand, Jake and Jane are also brown and _they_ were raised by a fish alien and a dude with fond memories of the antebellum south in your universe, so how _little_ did it care? Maybe they were ‘meant’ to be raised by a Polynesian and an Arabic family, respectively, but still. We are all our own sole antecedents, so on what basis can we claim to actually _be_ anything? Can we actually claim to be human?”

“Yeah: dead adult Jane and John each had a kid with a human, remember? That means we’re human, scientifically speaking,” Dave said. “Well, assuming their dads are capable of having natural children, but we’re already on a tangent and we are not diverting further to talk about the quality of Jane’s dad’s sperm, I refuse to allow it. Where is all this coming from?”

“Idunno; just musing.”

“I mean, there are presumably tests we can do and whatnot. Like, sendificate a sample back to 23andme or some shit,” Dave said. The fact that they could sendificate and appearify stuff from the alpha kids’ Earth had been surprising, but shouldn’t have been in retrospect; after all, every other coordinate these devices used (latitude, longitude, altitude) was relative to the Earth, so why wouldn’t the temporal one be, too?

“I suppose that could work,” Dirk said. “But I mean, even it it told us that we were genetically these exact ethnicities, would that mean anything? Race is a thing of history, and we have none.”

“That’s something everyone’s got to decide for themselves,” Dave said. “As I was saying, though, whatever race you are or even if you have a race, you’re not fucking White, which is what John clearly said you were in plain text right here on page three-eight-six of _ Homestuck_ , therefore _Homestuck_ is inaccurate. QED.”

“Okay but _Homestuck_ also tends to be abstract and metafictional, and has those blank sprites. What if when John’s calling me White, what he means is hashtag-eff-eff-eff-eff-eff-eff white?”

Dave rubbed his eyes. “Okay, but see, that’s another problem with it. Homestuck insists, quite blatantly and literally, that our lives are a work of fiction. Are you a figment of someone else’s imagination, Dirk?”

“There were once lots of people who believed we were all figments of someone else’s imagination. They referred to this person as ‘God.’”

“Yeah, and they were just as wrong as anyone else who believed in that fake shit, now weren’t they?”

Jade suddenly whistled, and everyone ceased their private conversations and gathered ‘round, floating above this random patch of jungle. “Alright, people, if my calculations are correct, we should be within a mile of the White House.”

“I thought DC was less jungle-y than this,” Roxy said.

“Presumably it was! But you see, when I was placing the Earth in this system I realized that there was no reason the north and south pole had to be in the same place that they once were, and so I decided to do some calculations to see if I couldn’t maximize the size of biomes,” Jade explained. “The result put [the north pole in Africa](http://www.worlddreambank.org/J/JAREDIA.HTM), but also dropped the sea level a ways and put most everything else in the tropics. Including Washington DC!”

“Jesus Christ, Jade, I still can’t believe you pulled that,” Dave said.

“I mean, the environment was already fucked to hell, so why not?” Jade said. “We can revive extinct species with ectobiology at literally any time.”

“I think you did grrreat,” Davepeta said over Jade’s phone; they’d stayed behind in what for lack of a better word can be called civilization because Jasprose had fallen into a mysterious coma and they felt responsible for whatever reason. Also absent were anyone who couldn’t fly (for logistical reasons), John, Rose, and Vriska (who accepted the epilogues as a true alternate reality they’d been fortunate enough to escape from and would much rather spend time with their girlfriends than out here), Jake (who had made some excuse about already having plans with Sollux, but it was clear that he didn’t feel comfortable spending huge amounts of time with both Jane _and_ Dirk), and Tavros (who didn’t gave a shit); this left half the Harleyberts, three fourths of the Strilondes, a pair of Nannasprites, and Aradia (who was just there for love of the sport, as it were).

“Tony the tiger, really?” Jade asked playfully. She addressed the group: “So, yeah. We’re here. Let’s be about it, people!”

The eight of them split up into a pre-arranged search pattern. They expected to be at it for hours if not days before they found anything--Jade nearly walking into a giant camo circus tent within half an hour, not so much.

“Hey, guys! I found something!” she shouted.

As the others came over, Jade took a step back and examined the scene.

“Is it the White House?” Dave asked.

“No, but--” Jade gestured. “Maybe the White House is in there?”

“Makes sense,” Aradia said. “Didn’t you people used to make all your buildings out of duct tape and prayers?”

“Drywall and two-by-fours,” Dave corrected.

“Same difference,” Aradia said. “The White House shouldn’t have been still standing by the time of the Epilogues. Something had to allow it to survive being underwater for two hundred sweeps and then the three hundred sweeps since we seeded this planet with life and then the twenty three hundred sweeps yet to go by the time you’re destined to find it.”

That had been another thing Dave had cited in his argument for the Epilogues being fake. “How can this peice of cloth protect _anything_ from six thousand years’ worth of the ravages of nature?”

“While I was waiting for you all to get over here I noticed some curious scorch marks on the branches of some nearby trees. Noticing a highly specific pattern, I then just sort of…” Jade grabbed a nearby branch and pulled, pushing it against the tent the way it might be in a strong gale. Soon thereafter there came a sizzling sound and smoke.

Aradia whistled. “That’ll certainly help matters.”

“Wanna open ‘er up?” Jade asked.

“Not until we have a plan for dealing with whatever’s inside this tent,” Aradia said. “The thing could be filled with sarin gas mixed with pure chlorine for all we know; that’d be one way to keep the local lifeforms from eating your wood and talc hovels.”

“She’s right, we’re going to need to come back to this at a later date. For now we look for landmarks, you know, just in case this isn’t the White House under here,” Dave said.

He looked at the great camo tent, his expression unreadable as ever, but with a hint of...balefulness?

“...Is it wrong that I’m kind of pissed about this?” he continued. “I mean, here I am trying to be a serious archeologist and this thing was literally gift wrapped for me.”

Jade shrugged. “It’s probably a natural feeling.”

She then called up a map of Washington DC and ascended into the sky, the others following.

“Alright, if this is the White House, the Washington Monument should be somewhere over there,” Jade pointed at a clearing, which in and of itself was a promising sight. “Like, we’re bound to find something; isn’t it a giant rock?”

“It’s actually not a monolith--I think it’s made out of like three or four different types of stone?--but it’s still probably our best bet.” Dave checked his phone. “It’s made of marble, granite, and bluestone gneiss, according to Wikipedia. Assuming I actually managed to get to a revision prior to the clown graffiti, this is what we should be looking for. So yeah, I guess if we find that we go home early?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So much to talk about.
> 
> I don't remember where the race headcanons come from--I began writing this a million years ago (hence why the June stuff is just sort of hinted at or tacked on at the end) and did not take notes--but they were definitely someone else's. I'm too White to be having race headcanons, but at the same time it felt like something the Forewarned Canon needed to have a firm stance on. Dirk's waffling wasn't me leaving some wiggle-room--canonically, the alpha kids are these races--it's the realization that in-universe there's no way for them to know for sure (unless they do the 23andme thing).
> 
> Jade tilting the Earth justifies the DC jungle, but mainly was done because of coolness.
> 
> Aradia just constantly dunking on our construction methods just made sense to me. I mean, she's an archeologist from a culture where children are made to design their own homes at a young age, which means she's going to have seen a lot of unique shit--of course she's going to take one look at our built-by-the-lowest-bidder McMansion-infested suburban hellscape and be like "WTF is this bullshit?"
> 
> And as for the tent, I mean, there's no plausible universe in which the White House survives for however many thousands of years it is until the Epilogues happen. Like, it's probably at least a LITTLE more sturdily-built than a random suburban McMansion, but still.


	7. Chapter 6

You continue to be Rose Lalonde, the Rose Lalonde whose night sky only contains a single star, Caedisol, Alternia’s sun, and you are bored. Sex ed is no less inept than in any other world, even regarding troll biology, which is something that in theory you’d be interested in if you weren’t already better informed than this video. We, however, are very interested, and so shall be listening while you doodle on your desk. 

NARRATOR: The rulbuckuqum is the stage one lifeform of the troll lifecycle. When a troll reaches sexual maturity, they start producing rulbuckuqum asexually. Just before rulbuckuqum bud off of the uterine wall they undergo a final partial mitosis, resulting in a single large cell with two nuclei. One nucleus will then become dormant, allowing the other to control the functions of the cell. 

If you were looking at the screen at this moment, you’d see a bunch of teaming amoebas, up to 300 micrometers in length according to the scale, whose only oddity to a Terran eye would be the double nuclei in each one. If you were listening you’d roll your eyes at the narrator’s refusal to use the more common word for these creatures, “qum.”

NARRATOR: In the Imperial Drone’s bucket, rulbuckuqum seek out and swap dormant nuclei with rulbuckuqum they aren’t related to. In Alternian folklore, it is said that the strength of a kismesitude or matespritship will influence how often they succeed, and therefore how dominant their genes will be in the next generation, but it has been scientifically proven that this is not the case. In point of fact, rulbuckuqum have a set of twenty six thousand distinct genetic keys that they use to identify and avoid mating with their siblings. Troll biologists puzzled over how to classify this system for centuries, but when presented with this information human biologists immediately recognized these as biological sexes of the sort used by fungi, ciliate bacteria, and other lower life forms on Earth. 

You lift your eyes from your desk and idly glance around the room.

On the screen you are still not looking at, two amoebae exchange a nucleus, then immediately start undergoing cell division.

NARRATOR: Once two rulbuckuqum exchange nuclei, they begin to grow into multicellular organisms, larval rybolhrapo. The rybolhrapo larvae consume the contents of the bucket in order to grow and survive--including, if they don’t find their way into a mother grub soon enough, one another. Upon being eaten by a mother grub, the larvae find their way to its small intestine, where they enter its blood stream, where they then make their way to, and infest the mother grub’s gonad. 

The amoebae have been replaced with something that looks like liver flukes.

NARRATOR: Trolls have no genes for gamete production, as para-animals ancestrally reproduce via nuclear transfer rather than cell fusion. Gametes are produced by manipulating the Mother Grub's gonad into manipulating the proto-gamete cells the rybolhrapo produces while ignoring its own germ-line cells.

NARRATOR: Unlike the gonads of most Terran lifeforms, which produce either sperm or ova and can be classified by this distinction, the gonads of pseudo-animals such as the Mother Grub repurpose the polar bodies left over after ova production to make sperm out of. This is slightly more efficient than the Terran model as it means you need only one kind of gonad instead of two, but makes it incredibly difficult for sexes, as humans commonly understand them, to evolve. This also means gonads generally have ways of separating sperm from eggs. Eggs and sperm are recombined in the mother grub’s womb and provided with eggs produced by the mother grub’s own body. 

Your eyes land on the new girl, Kanaya. You allow them to rest there a moment. Cute, you think to yourself, then go back to vandalizing your desk.

Rose: Ask Kanaya out after class.

It is now after class. You approach Kanaya, you’re about to try to get her attention, and you...and...and...

Rose: Have the self confidence of a mediocre White man.

You fail utterly to have the confidence of a mediocre White man. She walks away and you mutter something self-deprecating under your breath that I will allow the author to not repeat because we both know he shouldn’t be making “useless lesbian” jokes.

==>

You are now meandering about in front of the school, wondering if your mom is going to be sober enough to remember to pick you up. Well, whatever; if she’s not, you can always hang about town. Just as you have this thought, you spot John being bullied. You immediately rush to your friend’s aid with the only weapons you have at your disposal. Before you know it, you are pressing a knitting needle into the jugular vein of one Randal Martin Guy.

ROSE: You’re going to want to be putting him down now, if you know what’s good for you.  
RANDY: // fuck. you.  
ROSE: You have ten seconds. Don’t make your parents lose another child.  
RANDY: you can’t be serious. //  
ROSE: Eight seconds.

Something in your voice must tell him that you’re not fucking around, and he sets the hapless Egbert down on the ground and walks away.

ROSE: Do you want to tell the principal?  
JOHN: no, i mean, i get it. vriska did kill his brother, after all.  
ROSE: You had nothing to do with that. Really he should be angry at the authorities who failed to realize how dangerous her freak of a lusus was.  
JOHN: hey, no argument here! but like i said, i get it; vriska’s in a mental hospital and those guys are a bunch of faceless anonymous goons, so of course he’s going to take his anger out on the only person left. also you did threaten him with lethal force just now and i don’t want you to get in trouble, either. so please don’t call the principal, kanaya.

You start with a jolt; you’ve been so focused on the main event, as it were, that you didn’t notice you had an audience.

KANAYA: I Wasnt Going To For The Record  
KANAYA: It Was Clear That The Situation Had Sorted Itself Out  
KANAYA: I Am Curious However...  
KANAYA: Is This Vriska You Mentioned Vriska Serket  
JOHN: oh, do you know her? i--oh, that’s my dad; we’ll talk later, okay?

And with that John leaves.

ROSE: This humble suburb is indeed the location of the worlds-infamous Vriska Serket Incident.  
KANAYA: I See. I Actually Knew Her, Too.  
ROSE: Did you now?  
KANAYA: Yes But Only On The Internet  
KANAYA: She...Wasnt Interested In Anything More Than That  
ROSE: Wait...grimAuxiliatrix?  
KANAYA: Um Yes?  
ROSE: I’m tentacleTherapist. Long time no see.  
KANAYA: Oh Yes What A Coincidence  
KANAYA: It Is Sad That She Created So Much Backlash Against Trolls.

Your snort is derisive, but it’s not aimed in her direction.

ROSE: You’re giving her too much credit. If anything, those people were thrilled to finally have an excuse. What truly scares them is the prospect of human/troll sloppy makeouts.  
KANAYA: What  
ROSE: It’s the patriarchy, you see. The American Right is hardly going to just up and admit that they’re out to control women’s sexuality, so they couch their arguments in other “concerns”, such as STDs and teen pregnancies. (Which their programs just make worse, but I digress.) Well, you can’t exactly get knocked up or catch anything from a troll, so shit was getting all...multicultural, shall we say? But now they get to say that trolls are just too dangerous to have in our schools, which is actually the vastly superior thing for them, anyway, as they’re also not fans of your pannormativity, multiple pagan faiths, or the horns.  
KANAYA: Human Politics Sure Are Weird

You look at her, trying to gage her level of interest, then nonchalantly pick at your fingernails with the the needle you just threatened a boy’s life with, trying to look cool.

ROSE: Perhaps we can talk about it some time. Say, on the way to a movie theater to have our first date?  
KANAYA: Wait What  
ROSE: Sorry, I just assumed--  
KANAYA: No Im Interested Im Just Surprised Is All  
KANAYA: I Thought Humans Were All Supposed To Be Heterosexual Due To Your Bizarre Diadic Reproductive Cycle  
ROSE: Well, a lot of us are, but I mean, if that were the case, why would we even have words for heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, et cetera?  
KANAYA: In Retrospect It Seems So Obvious  
ROSE: I’m glad I could widen your horizons, but I didn’t actually get a “yes” or “no” on that date…?  
KANAYA: Oh Yes Lets Go To The Movies And Discuss Human Politics

==>

ROSE: ...and being a heroic wartime president after Clinton was martyred in the Troll War made it easy for Gore to win the next two elections, which he then used to repair our infrastructure, economy, and environment, though detractors will say that anyone could have done that with all the influx of troll technology we’ve been getting. Regardless, it meant Barack Obama managed to win the last two elections, and the strength of the economy under him has been so strong that the Democrat stranglehold on power is unlikely to be challenged any time soon. Quite frankly, being in power this long is making them, just, horribly corrupt, but I mean, what are you going to do, vote Republican? Those motherfuckers are crazy.  
KANAYA: Very Fascinating  
KANAYA: Im Given To Understand That Troll Politics Has Traditionally Been Very Simple: You Obey Those Above You Or Get Culled  
KANAYA: Then We Fell Into Lawlessness When We Were Cut Off From The Rest Of The Empire And Are Technically A Failed State But No One Can Really Tell The Difference Between That And Imperial Rule Except For The Lack Of Imperial Drones And The Regions Of Stability  
ROSE: Yes, I’ve heard the situation is...dynamic. Some of the “advisors” who’ve gone to Alterina are little better than the filibusters of old.  
ROSE: But that’s enough about the sorry state of the worlds, if you don’t mind; I’d rather talk about something more fascinating, such as yourself.

Kanaya blushes prettily.

KANAYA: Im Afraid My Story Isnt Much Less Sad  
KANAYA: When My Lusus...  
KANAYA: Died  
KANAYA: I Was Able To Hide It For A While Thanks To Living In The Middle Of Nowhere With No Neighbors But The Shadow Dropper Hordes But Was Eventually Found Out And Had To Leave  
KANAYA: Even Then I Was Reluctant To Come To Earth  
ROSE: Oh?  
KANAYA: Yes

Kanaya looks out over the road.

KANAYA: We Had No Word For Lesbian Before Humans Showed Up But We Must Have Always Existed  
KANAYA: Presumably Its Easier To Hide “Deviant” Sexualities In A Pannormative Culture Than In A Heteronormative One  
KANAYA: Or It Could Simply Be That Anyone Who Challenged The Status Quo Got Culled  
KANAYA: But At The Very Least I Could Still Date In A Pannormative Culture Which I Didnt Think Would Be An Option Here  
ROSE: I suppose I can understand that. Oh, look; we’re here.

You approach the ticket stand.

ROSE: Two for _Oz the Great and Powerful_, please. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The good thing about getting exposition about troll biology this way is that if I screw up how any biological principles work I can just claim the documentary was dumbing it down for laypeople. The bad thing is that I do have to leave things out or give slightly misleading information at times, because this is supposed to be dumbed down for laypeople. Like, the Alternian intelligentsia at least did in fact know how their own reproduction worked, they just didn't have any concise way to summarize what those funky amoebae were doing until humans came along and were like "those are sexes".
> 
> Trolls not even being able to produce gametes "naturally" is a recent innovation in my ever-evolving troll biology headcanons. Originally the rybolhrapo just hung out in the gonad, pumping out sperm and eggs, but then I realized that it didn't really make sense for an organism to use both cell fusion (the proper name for our mode of reproduction) and nuclear transfer (I didn't catch the name for the other kind and took a stab in the dark) at distinct points in its life cycle--evolutionary, you only need one. My solution was to make troll reproductive parasitism even more thorough than before.
> 
> I do have a evolutionary family tree of sorts for trolls in mind. Their ancestors could evolve all the way to para-frogs without being impeded by their reproductive method overmuch, but the second they try to move away from the water they're in big trouble--you're never going to get any para-amniotes. They could dig spawning pits, or they could weave "egg" sacks to carry their spawn around in, or you could keep your young in your stomach like that extinct frog...or else there's plenty of water, nutrition, and safety in the bodies of other living things. Para-animals have a distinct bias towards parasitism as a result.
> 
> The names for various troll life stages (presumably the formal names in some Latin-esque dead language) I came up with by using a "translator" for Uryomocco from EGS (actually just a cypher), so the fact that the troll equivalent of ejaculate was something that could reasonably be truncated in a way that let it sound identical to "cum" was just a lucky coincidence.
> 
> Originally this Rose was going to be getting a lot more feedback from Jasprose, and thus experiences a sort of inexplicable fascination with Kanaya, but that aspect of the story was dropped. Technically we don't really get an explanation of what this Rose sees in this Kanaya, but like, do we REALLY need one at this point? She asked her on a date, not for her hand in marriage, after all. Conversely, I think it's fairly obvious what this Kanaya sees in this Rose.
> 
> "I thought humans were all supposed to be heterosexual due to your bizarre diadic reproductive cycle" is my favorite single line in the entire work, full stop. 
> 
> As for the politics of TwoStar!Earth (or at least TwoStar!America), I wouldn't normally say that it's very plausible that Obama would still win after a Gore presidency--people are going to get tired of Democrats after sixteen years, many of the issues he ran on in our timeline don't exist, and, as our own recent history has shown, our country hasn't exactly solved racism yet--but this is Homestuck!Obama, and he'll find a way to do what needs to be done.


	8. Chapter 7

“Hey J.E. are you still he--holy shit.” Sollux’s new robot eyes took in the massive server farm Jake had created.

“Hey, Sollux,” Jake said, setting down an unsettlingly warm and pliable troll computer tower and wiping his brow. “I know you said a hundred computers, but I figured that anything you could do with a hundred you could do better with two hundred, or three...and so I figured, why not just keep going?”

“You could have left hours ago, and joined Dave’s expedition with Dirk and Jane and--oh.”

Sollux realized that that was exactly what he was avoiding, and Jake noticed him realizing this.

“Don’t get me wrong, Dirk and Janey are top notch friends, it’s just that spending prolonged periods of time with them, after what we all read, is...yeah.”

“Yeah, I can see how them becoming supervillains would turn you off of them, on top of your romantic history.”

“You’ve got it all wrong!” Jake protested. “The problem is me. After everything Homestuck and the Epilogues revealed about me, they must hate me!”

“..._Aaand_ I’ve reached the end of my capacity to give a shit about this nonsense,” Sollux said. “Anyway, I’ve done it, and I thought you’d like to see what I’ve found.”

“Oh. Absolutely!”

It had been only natural for Sollux to start probing and prodding at things as soon as he’d finished reading Homestuck, and he found easily enough that while their access to it was through a server in the furthest ring, it didn’t originate there--the server was a mere node, connecting two networks, and if they could only take down certain firewalls, they could see what sort of network Homestuck was a part of--and perhaps answer some deeper questions about the nature of reality that Homestuck’s existence raised.

Well, Sollux had done it. He had busted through to the internet _Homestuck_ was hosted on, and seeing it, had learned something that, while it was a logical consequence of what they’d already known, was mind-blowing nonetheless. “Dude...we have _fans_.”

~ ~ ~

The existential quandaries of the fact that Homestuck was apparently a work of fiction with like an author and everything was as easy to solve as reconciling the fact that humans were naturally evolved animals with the fact that they were created in the trolls’ image; if the game could “see” all the myriad paths evolution might take on Earth and select the one that lead to creatures that looked and thought like trolls--more or less--to be the Alpha timeline, creating an offshoot where someone just so happened to dream up their adventures and create a webcomic about it was trivial in comparison--indeed, it had previously been suspected that the ever-so-convenient mythologies of the Lands of This Thing and That Thing were similarly “procedurally generated.”

The “cringiness” of the fandom also wasn’t the problem. Indeed, if one’s life _had_ to be made into a story, one would _hope_ it would be one people cared about! The fansongs and “lyricstrucks” were cute, the troll cosplayers were charming, and the fact that there were Gamzee Makara stans and DaveRose shippers...well, okay, _that_ part was disgusting, but they can’t all be winners.

No, the problem was--actually, it was two very closely related problems. The first was that not only had _Homestuck_ and its epilogues laid bare all of their problems for public consumption, it turns out that there _was_ a public who _had_ consumed it. Analyzed it. Digested it and regurgitated their hot takes and theories to one another to be examined by the fandom. The other problem, the far worse problem, was that some of these theories were actually _good_. They had discovered [Optimistic Duelist’s youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnIMZgvwYgYIIXQjrZNPNzw/videos), and through it [the Perfectly Generic Podcast](https://perfectlygenericpodcast.com/)\--because handing them all a list of their sins hadn’t been good enough for Paradox Space, apparently; it also felt the need to provide them with exposition about what it all meant, just in case they were all too slow to figure it out on their own.

Jake English rubbed his eyes. He felt raw. He called Dirk.

“What’s up, Jake.”

“Have you perchance watched Optimistic Duelist’s complete and merciless vivisection of my psyche? It’s alright if you have; in fact, I’m kind of counting on having someone to talk to about it.”

“Yeah, it was...illuminating,” Dirk admitted. “That is, I meant to say, what a bastard.”

“No, it’s alright. As far as he’s concerned, we’re fictional characters, so airing out our dirty laundry’s a morally neutral act. And frankly, it wouldn’t have hurt so much if it wasn’t a hundred percent true,” Jake said.

“I’m sure we’ve all got similar lambastings in our future. You’re just first because you’re his favorite character,” Dirk said.

“Lucky me,” Jake said, dripping sarcasm. He sighed. “I feel like I was just spoon fed character development. Like, here you go, a list of every bad thing you’ve ever done--does the annotation help, or are we going to have to use smaller words to make it sink into your tiny little baby brain?”

“If the worst things you ever did was breaking my and Jane’s hearts, I’d say you’re ahead of the game,” Dirk said.

“I’m emotionally drained, too exhausted to even think about how I’m going to fix this about myself.” Jake groaned. “If only real life was like in the movies, where once you realize you have a problem you can just...stop doing it.”

“If only. I mean, look at me; I’ve known about my megalomaniacal tendencies for a long time, and apparently that knowledge didn’t do me any good,” Dirk said.

“Hey now, we failed as a community in those timelines. It’s just as damning for the rest of us that no one was there to help you as it is that, isolated, you were consumed by your demons,” Jake said.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“...This guy apparently writes fanfiction, as well,” Jake said. “Since he apparently knows us better than we know ourselves, do you think he was good enough to outline our redemption arcs in one of them?”

Dirk snorted. “Step one is probably us getting back together.”

“...Would that be such a bad thing?” Jake realized what he said, and was mortified. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be putting that on you. I just--”

“Jake,” Dirk said softly, and it shut him up. “There’s no need to apologize. We’re all feeling all kinds of things about all of this.”

“Right. Yeah.”

“The truth is we both kind of squandered what we had. And having it all presented back to us like this really makes it apparent that we did so stupidly, by being stupid kids. The problems we had seem almost laughable in that light...but it still _hurts_. It wasn’t that long ago in actual temporal time, not for us. I don’t want to close any doors here, but...it won’t be today. Tomorrow doesn’t look good, either.”

“Yeah,” Jake said again, more naturally than before. “Hey. I’ll see you around, right? As friends, I mean.”

“...Yeah,” Dirk said, finally. “Later,” he hung up.

Jake sighed. That had gone...about as well as could reasonably be hoped, actually. Better, in fact. And Dirk _was_ right. Things _were_ too raw between them. Too recent. Now wasn’t the time...but at least it didn’t have to be this way forever. There was hope, and that was a scary thing.

He noticed the computer screen. Taz had written a new story. Steeling himself, Jake began to read [The Apocryphon of Jake English](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19978669).


	9. Chapter 8

“The problem is actually quite simple: we need guidance. Whether or not you accept _The Homestuck Epilogues_ as a true reality, they lay bare a stark truth: that when you give a bunch of socially maladapted, dumbshit teens ultimate power and tell them to build a utopia, shockingly, they’re going to fuck it up in ways you can’t even imagine,” Rose said. “Quite obvious in retrospect, really. But we run into a slight complication when trying to solve this problem, namely that there is no one we can seek guidance _from_.”

“We could appearify people from my Earth,” Jane suggested.

“Wasn’t literally one of the major problems with Earth C in the Epilogues the fact that humans were in control of everything?” Karkat demanded. “Seems to me that putting humans in charge of everything from the start will just make things go to shit even faster. Especially since, if we pull them from during the Condesce’s reign, they’ll have actual _ reason _to hate and fear trolls.”

“I think the problem is that we abdicated responsibility,” Dirk said. “As soon as shit was set up in that timeline, we fucked off to the future to luxuriate in fame and acclaim from then on, which probably made us a little bit crazy in and of itself.”

“Also I don’t think we should, like, kidnap people?” Jade said.

“Certainly there were many failings, but I think the fact that we basically didn’t know what we were doing is at the core of it,” Rose said. “As for consent, that’s simple enough: we don’t use the transportalizer, we use John’s retcon powers.”

John’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, and that solves Karkat’s issue--”

“Phrasing,” Kanaya interjected.

“--because I can go anywhere! Earth, Alternia, Prospit--”

“Can you, though? My impression, especially after reading the Epilogues, was that you can go anywhere in ‘the story.’ Don’t get me wrong, we should definitely try it--nothing would please me more than to have you go back and rescue the lost lore of the Library of Alexandria--but I do have a plan in case that fails,” said Rose.

“Alright. Library of Alexandria, you said?”

“Yes. Pick me up a scroll from before the fire.”

“Alright.” John closed his eyes and concentrated...nothing happened. He opened his eyes. “Damn. Sorry, Rose.”

“Don’t be, I expected this.”

“Alright, so what’s your plan to get around this problem, then?” Karkat asked.

Rose grinned. “We make our own story. I think we can do it. Consider how the plurality of us in this room came into being: my mom, Dave’s bro, Jade’s grandpa, and John’s nanna were all clones of themselves, and we were all admixtures of them. That’s eight people who were caused to exist, primarily, by one of their own dicking around in an ectobiology lab. Do you have any idea what that implies about the nature of our universe? Complexity can arise from nothing! Patterns emerging spontaneously from the void. There’s an entire class of object whose existence is based on this principle--jujus. Jujus can presumably do anything that’s allowed to happen by the physical laws of reality, because logically that is the only limit on what a juju can be: not even something that can physically _be made_, but something that can physically _exist_. Which are two very different questions, in this instance.

“Which raises the question of why do some time loops exist while an infinite number of equally valid time loops do not. Why, among the countless infinities of the valid SBURB sessions that could have arisen on my Earth, were _we_ summoned out of the void? Here’s a hint: I chose the word ‘summoned’ deliberately.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why Homestuck exists, what it’s connection to our lives is, and I do not believe it was created solely to spoon feed us exposition about what the origins and potential consequences of our interpersonal issues are, or primarily for that purpose, or even that we were ever supposed to know about it at all.

“My theory is this: We live in a reality where the world of ideas predominates over the physical world, and _Homestuck_ created the idea of us. It put that idea in the heads of millions of people, allowing that resonant frequency to spread in the platonic realm until our loops were made real. It is the magic ritual that summoned us into existence.

“Carl Sagan once said that if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe--but the thing is, we live in a reality where causality doesn’t always work like that. If an apple pie exists _hard_ enough, a universe will grow around it to retroactively justify its existence--and this universe, once properly established, doesn’t go away just because you ate the pie.

“And we can do better than writing a story about humans, one about trolls, etcetera. We can write a story about carapacians, consorts, trolls, and humans, and if we make it exist hard enough to build a world around it, the people of that world will of necessity have had to solve many of the same problems we’re facing with Earth C.

“It’s not that simple, though. First, we don’t have an audience with which to create a resonance, so we need to tap into the resonance of something that already exists. We need to take a story that’s already popular and replace the characters with our own creations. Furthermore, since I doubt anyone here is willing to write out the entire genetic codes of all the characters (which would make for boring reading, regardless), the only way to ensure that the people are the species we want is to cast real people as the characters. Ourselves.”

“So basically we’re writing [_JoJoStuck_](https://mspfa.com/?s=13714&p=1),” Dave said.

“That _is_ where I got the idea from,” Rose admitted, “but no, not literally. Firstly, someone else already wrote it. Secondly, if this world is going to be real it has to abide by the laws of our reality, and that means no magic powers we’re not sure can be replicated in it or things like my mother somehow being a carapacian. Thirdly, quite frankly, we can _do_ better than _JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure_.”

“How about _Complacency of the Learned_,” Roxy suggested.

“Also not ideal,” Rose said. “For one thing, that only really solves the final problem. I also _really_ don’t want to subject even fake versions of our friends and ourselves to the horrifying ways in which everyone dies in that series. And in any case, it might not be as popular as we need.

“I’m thinking something in the _Sherlock Holmes_ canon. It’s a series that’s been intensely popular in both Earths for over a century, and presumably also was in any timeline that spun off of either after 1887. It codified an entire genre of story that other genres have since spun off of, and unlike other series in its genre there are several stories in which no one dies.

“Personally, I think we should go with _A Scandal in Bohemia_.”

“What about one of the many troll sagas which have been popular for hundreds of sweeps?” Karkat asked.

“Name one with no major character deaths,” Terezi said.

“...Fair point. Alright, I think we have enough of an idea of what our basic strategy is to vote on whether or not it’s a good idea.”

Governance on Earth C was a very informal affair, but there had to be _some_ structure, if only to ensure they wouldn’t cause a civil war. The structure was this: there was a ruling council composed of the players and anyone whom they elected to join them, and an annual plebiscite to decide whether or not the council should stay in power. Councilors could more or less do whatever they wanted, but “major” decisions--a category that was intentionally vague, but which this certainly fell under--required a vote.

They voted to go ahead with the plan.

“So what, are we going to start writing the fanfiction now?” Dave asked.

“I was thinking that Roxy could just pull the completed story out of non-existence. For one thing, this will be a lot quicker. More importantly, the version she produces like this should follow the path of least resistance, as it were--and any error we make in judging who would be ‘perfect’ for what role makes making it real that much harder.”

Roxy closed her eyes and concentrated. For a while, nothing happened. She began perspiring. And then, after a full minute, a book appeared in her hands. It was titled _The Adventures of Terezi Pyrope: A Scandal in Bohemia_.

“Aight, now what?” Roxy asked.

“Now, John: this isn’t the first time you’ve gone into a work of fiction. Take us into the book.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here I came up with an entirely separate form of alternate universe that can justify a lot of much crazier things than can happen in the viscera of the Green Sun.
> 
> Originally Rose claimed that the majority of the people in that room were created by John, but then I stopped to think about who would actually be there at this point, since John brought all those people back from the battle with Lord English, and I realized that GCATavros, Davepeta, and ARquius being there means the only trolls that are missing are Gamzee, Eridan, and Feferi. Also WV and PM would be there.


	10. Chapter 9

A documentary about troll evolution plays on the television. Again you don’t care, as the National Geographic channel is just background noise while you do your homework, but we the audience are endlessly fascinated by the mysteries of troll biology and ecology, and so shall be listening in quite intensely.

NARRATOR: ...as trolls spread across Alternia they adapted and diversified to the point where it is difficult to say where the line is properly drawn between species and subspecies or even subspecies and race. Some go so far as to attempt to categorize them into up to three separate genera, but this task is made difficult by the extensive mosaic evolution that was happening during the previous three million years of troll evolution.  
NARRATOR: Only two subspecies that evolved during this time would survive to the present day.

NARRATOR: What we know of as female trolls rose to prominence during the paleolithic. These trolls were originally desert-dwelling, primarily hunters and wide-ranging, and their development reflected that: lithe, runners’ bodies, pectoral fatty humps that would keep them alive in lean times, and they lost their ovipositors in favor of opening their rulbuckuqum pouches to the body’s exterior, creating natural buckets.

NARRATOR: The secret that allowed them to spread beyond the deserts without being absorbed into the other subspecies by interbreeding, however, was chromosomal inversion. Such chromosomal inversions are actually quite common in nature, being responsible for such things as the division of white-throated sparrow into white striped and tan striped morphs and also is the mechanism of sex selection in the majority of Terran clades. In a chromosomal inversion, a chromosome or part of a chromosome is essentially “flipped” upside down, making it impossible for it to trade genes with its counterpart--a handy thing to have if you have a complex of genes you want to prevent from getting diluted, which is why XY and WZ sex selection schemes are so common on Earth. It was also useful for this breed of troll when they expanded their range beyond their home deserts and indeed their home continent, as it prevented their unique adaptations from being watered down.

NARRATOR: What we know of as male trolls are just as ancient as female trolls, but rose to prominence a lot later. These trolls were primarily gatherers and adapted to fertile mountain valleys. They became burly in order to fiercely protect their ranges and developed large, fleshy ovipositors in order to lay their spawn deep within fruit, increasing the odds of proto-Mother Grubs being tricked into eating them. While well adapted to their environment, these trolls had no particular edge that would allow them to spread beyond and dominate Alternia and were just one among a multitude.

NARRATOR: However, it was in these mountain valleys that agriculture was first developed. This gave them the advantage in numbers that, along with their territoriality, allowed them to absorb or push out all the other troll subraces they met in their expansion with little trouble. They were extremely successful; when not accounting for genetic augmentation 90% of the modern troll genome traces back to these valleys, including that of female trolls, their morph being preserved by the chromosomal inversion.

You hear your mom pull up to the house and come inside.

MOM: whats on  
ROSE: Some documentary about how Alternia’s prehistory was dominated by roving bands of feral lesbians. I haven’t really been paying attention.  
MOM: k neat  
MOM: speaking of trolls an lesbians  
MOM: sooo rosie………  
MOM: this kanaya gurl  
MOM: is she like...ur girlfriemd?

You swallow. For the past couple weeks, you’ve been feeling like hot shit, pretty justifiably, what with having your first girlfriend and all. The problem is, you have no fucking idea where your mother stands on these issues. She is fucking inscrutable. And you...you’ve never been this aware before of just how much power she has over you. She feeds you. She clothes you. She houses you. Without her you have no access to education. And even beyond that, there is the simple emotional fact that if she rejects you you’ll be devastated. But you are Rose Lalonde and you have nerves of fucking steel, so you do the bravest thing a person in your position could possibly do.

ROSE: Yes.  
MOM: oh good

ROSE: Wait--what?

You are incredulous. Like, you’re glad she’s not kicking you out, don’t get you wrong, but...seriously?

ROSE: Is this an “at least you won’t get pregnant” thing, because I swear to God…  
MOM: nah. k like that too but mainly its cuz...k this is a long story but after the stars wnt out i got this package from the future from u  
ROSE: What?  
MOM: c’mere an look

You follow her into her room, where she grabs some papers out of a shoe box and show them to you. That is your handwriting, but you never wrote this:

_ Roxy Lalonde, this is your daughter from the future, and the game has completely changed. The old threat has passed your world by and the new threat is simultaneously more and less imminent. The sort of bastard reality you’re in now is something that was foreseen by the force that orchestrated the destruction of the troll and human universes and the version of him that exists here will seek your civilizations’ destruction to prevent the possibility of you escaping. _

_ Defeating him is not, in theory, easy, but fortunately you have some aces up your sleeve: the fact that his omniscience is blind to you (he’s omniscient, by the way), Jake Harley’s dog, Becquerel, which is the same sort of creature that he is and has all his powers sans the aforementioned omniscience, and the benefit of my instruction. There’s also a weapon capable of killing him; the problem is, it’s in his possession, and once you have it you only get one shot. (There are other ways to kill him, of course, but this is the only way that guarantees his death won’t summon something worse. Indeed, I hypothesize that this is exactly why he had the unmitigated arrogance to carry something capable of killing him around with him at all times--so that, should he find himself in a doomed pocket of spacetime such as the one you’re in he can avoid sucking his master into the trap with him.) _

_ There are a number of relevant pictures included. The gun is, as you might have guessed, the weapon. You need to have Beq teleport it to you at an opportune time, fire it, and have Beq teleport the bullet into your adversary, the being with the white spherical head. Teleport the remains to the edge of your little bubble of spacetime and let them drift out into the purifying fires of the Green Sun. _

_ Next you’ll need to deal with Gl’bgolyb, Alternia’s resident Outer God. This thing cannot be allowed to speak the Vast Glub or everyone on Alternia will die, and it will do so if it finds itself dying. Fortunately, though, the fact that your universe has an edge will once again come in handy here; teleport it to the edge and just have Beq sort of push it out. _

_ Now, then, there lives in Texas a man named Dirk Strider who owns a puppet named Lil Cal. For reasons that would take a ludicrously long time to explain, you’ve got to destroy this puppet, too. Have Beq steal it, chuck it in a wood chipper, and, you guessed it, teleport the remains to the edge of the universe and let them drift out. _

_ Once you’ve successfully done this, the world is saved. Now you’re immediately going to have to save it again. First, you’ve just orphaned a girl named Feferi Piexies, and she needs to be adopted into a nice, loving, human family who will teach her the value of democracy and social justice. _

_ Second, a bunch of troll assholes are going to invade the Earth. The bad news is that trolls are technologically and physically superior to you in most ways imaginable; the good news is that these are all fucking children whose only knowledge of strategy or tactics comes from LARPing, that they’re not even slightly unified, and that there’s plenty of people back on Alternia who hate their guts and are willing to fuck with them out of pettiness or high-minded ideals or both. The war is going to get...interesting. _

_ At this point, the world is still technically doomed, as you’re in a pocket of spacetime that will eventually unspool like a poorly knitted sweater, but that’s a problem the smartest people in two worlds should have centuries to try to solve. _

_ And Mom? This isn’t really an instruction, but...I love you. I love you so very, very much, and I’m sorry I never said it. _

You blink, and look at your mother. 

ROSE: This is certainly...illuminating...but I don't see what it has to do with Kanaya.

MOM: hmm? o srry thats the wrong letter

Mom hands you another folded-up piece of paper. On the outside it reads, _ Give this letter to Rose when she starts to date Kanaya. _

__

__

You open it: 

_ To the version of myself native to that reality (I know Mom already let you read the wrong letter and will let that serve as my credentials), you’re not the me I need to talk to, just the conduit. Sorry about the fact that I’m basically voyeuristically peeping on your life; I could say that it had to happen so that I could write this message so that the world you grew up in could exist at all, but let’s not hide behind causal inevitability--my friends and I have dealt with far more than our share of that bullshit--and besides, that’s not why I did it. I’d explain, but my actual past self is also reading this, through you, and it’ll be addressed in what I need to say to her regardless. _

_ To my past self: I get it. Mom is dead. Your Kanaya is dead. You were cheated of your reunion with her by being brought back to life, this reality’s Kanaya is content with the “real” Rose, and then you got merged with your cat. Our life sucks and it’s so much nicer to revel in the charmed life of someone who has all those things we lost and will never have the weight of the universe on her shoulders or feel the guilt of knowing that in your own native timeline everyone died and you failed . But you have to wake up. This isn’t your life, and you can’t stay subsumed in her persona. Take it from me, the one person who really, truly knows: It gets better. _

_ Also, these idiots nearly derped a steampunk Alternian empire into existence and we need to be there to make sure they don’t try it again.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ominous final line is ominous. 
> 
> I cringe a bit at how this documentary's description of trolls...I don't even have the language to describe it; like, it just sort of assumes a specific set of societal beauty standards are default (...there's got to be a better way to say what I'm trying to say), but this is something that was made by a major corporation in 2013 (check the date the movie Rose and Kanaya saw came out) for an audience of lay people. So yeah. And in any case, there was a point to get across: a naked troll looks, more or less, like a naked human (sorry, tentabulge fans), and evolved to be that way under very different pressures. We established last time that troll sexes aren't sexes, and now we saw what troll sexes actually are.
> 
> I've also got headcanons about troll nipples and the origins of the hemospectrum, but alas, I couldn't fit them in this fic.
> 
> The thing that concerned Doc Scratch isn't that these people would become some sort of spanner in the works if their society were allowed to flourish--though that possibility exists--its that if they managed to find a way to pilot their pocket dimension and get it to escape the pull of the Green Sun, they'd be depriving it of their mass-energy. A drop in the bucket, of course, but oceans are made of rain.
> 
> Oh, and shout out to discord user Arrghus, who when I explained my troll biology headcanons responded with "What I'm getting from this is that Alternia's prehistory was dominated by roving bands of feral lesbians." It is a line I knew immediately had to be used.


	11. Chapter 10 Chapter 1

i had seen little of pyrope lately. my marriage had drifted us away from each other. my own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while pyrope, who loathed every form of society with her whole bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in baker street, buried among her old books. she was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied her immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which had been abandoned as hopeless by the official police. from time to time i heard some vague account of her doings: of her summons to odessa in the case of the trepoff murder, of her clearing up of the singular tragedy of the atkinson brothers at trincomalee, and finally of the mission which she had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of holland. beyond these signs of her activity, however, which i merely shared with all the readers of the daily press, i knew little of my former friend and companion.

one night--it was on the twentieth of march, 1888--i was returning from a journey to a patient (for i had now returned to civil practice), when my way led me through baker street. as i passed the well-remembered door, which must always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark incidents of the study in scarlet, i was seized with a keen desire to see pyrope again, and to know how she was employing her extraordinary powers. her rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as i looked up, i saw her spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. she was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with her head sunk upon her chest and her hands clasped behind her. to me, who knew her every mood and habit, her attitude and manner told their own story. she was at work again. she was hot upon the scent of some new problem. i rang the bell and was shown up to the chamber which had formerly been in part my own.

her manner was not effusive. it seldom was; but she was glad, i think, to see me. with hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, she waved me to an armchair, threw across her case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner. then she stood before the fire and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion.

before i could mention the gasogene and ask if she was drinking faygo again, she spoke.

“W3DLOCK SU1TS YOU,” she remarked. “1 THINK, 3GB3RT, THAT YOU H4V3 PUT ON S3V3N 4ND 4 H4LF POUNDS S1NC3 1 L4ST S4W YOU.”

“seven!” i answered.

“1ND33D, 1 SHOULD H4V3 THOUGHT 4 L1TTL3 MOR3. JUST 4 TR1FL3 MOR3, 1 F4NCY, 3GB3RT. 4ND 1N PR4CT1CE 4G41N, 1 OBS3RV3. YOU D1D NOT T3LL M3 TH4T YOU 1NT3ND3D TO GO 1NTO H4RN3SS.”

“Then, how do you know?”

“1 SM3LL IT, 1 D3DUC3 1T. HOW DO 1 KNOW TH4T YOU H4V3 B33N G3TT1NG YOURS3LF V3RY W3T L4T3LY, 4ND TH4T YOU H4V3 4 MOST CLUMSY 4ND C4R3L3SS S3RV4NT?”

“my dear pyrope,” said i, “this is too much. you would certainly have been burned a few centuries ago. it is true that i had a country walk on thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as i have changed my clothes i can’t imagine how you deduce it. as to tavros, he is incorrigible, and roxy has given her notice, but there, again, i fail to see how you work it out.”

she chuckled to herself and rubbed her long, nervous hands together.

“1T 1S S1MPL1C1TY 1TS3LF,” said she; “MY NOS3 T3LLS M3 TH4T ON TH3 1NS1D3 OF YOUR L3FT SHO3 TH3 L34TH3R 1S SCOR3D BY S1X 4LMOST P4RALL3L CUTS. OBV1OUSLY TH3Y H4V3 B33N C4US3D BY SOM3ON3 WHO H4S V3RY C4R3L3SSLY SCR4P3D ROUND THE 3DG3S OF TH3 SOL3 IN ORD3R TO R3MOV3 CRUST3D MUD FROM 1T. H3NC3, YOU S33, MY DOUBL3 D3DUCT1ON TH4T YOU H4D B33N OUT 1N V1L3 W34TH3R, 4ND TH4T YOU H4D 4 P4RT1CUL4RLY M4L1GN4NT BOOT-SL1TT1NG SP3C1M3N OF TH3 LONDON SL4V3Y. 4S TO YOUR PR4CT1C3, 1F 4 G3NTL3M4N W4LKS 1NTO MY ROOMS SM3LL1NG OF 1ODOFORM, W1TH 4 BL4CK M4RK OF N1TR4T3 OF S1LV3R UPON H1S R1GHT FOR3F1NG3R, 4ND 4 BULG3 ON TH3 R1GHT S1D3 OF H1S TOP-H4T TO SHOW WH3R3 H3 H4S S3CR3T3D H1S ST3THOSCOP3, 1 MUST B3 DULL, 1ND33D, 1F 1 DO NOT PRONOUNC3 H1M TO B3 4N 4CT1V3 M3MB3R OF TH3 M3D1C4L PROF3SS1ON.”

i could not help laughing at the ease with which she explained her process of deduction. “when i hear you give your reasons,” i remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that i could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning i am baffled until you explain your process. and yet i believe that my eyes are as good as your nose.”

“QU1T3 SO,” she answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing herself down into an armchair. “YOU S33, BUT YOU DO NOT OBS3RV3. TH3 D1ST1NCT1ON 1S CL34R. FOR 3X4MPL3, YOU H4V3 FR3QU3NTLY S33N TH3 ST3PS WH1CH L34D UP FROM TH3 H4LL TO TH1S ROOM.”

“frequently.”

“HOW OFT3N?”

“well, some hundreds of times.”

“TH3N HOW M4NY 4R3 TH3R3?”

“how many? i don’t know.”

“QU1T3 SO! YOU H4V3 NOT OBS3RV3D. 4ND Y3T YOU H4V3 S33N. TH4T 1S JUST MY PO1NT. NOW, 1 KNOW TH4T TH3R3 4R3 S3V3NT33N ST3PS, B3C4US3 1 H4V3 BOTH S33N 4ND OBS3RV3D. BY TH3 W4Y, S1NC3 YOU 4R3 1NT3R3ST3D 1N TH3S3 L1TTL3 PROBL3MS, 4ND S1NC3 YOU 4R3 GOOD 3NOUGH TO CHRON1CL3 ON3 OR TWO OF MY TR1FL1NG 3XP3R13NC3S, YOU M4Y B3 1NT3R3ST3D 1N TH1S.” she threw over a sheet of thick, pink-tinted notepaper which had been lying open upon the table. “1T C4M3 BY TH3 L4ST POST,” said she. “R34D 1T 4LOUD.”

the note was undated, and without either signature or address.

“There will call upon you to-night, at a quarter to eight o’clock,” it said, “a gentleman who desires to consult you upon a matter of the very deepest moment. Your recent services to one of the royal houses of europe have shown that you are one who may safely be trusted with matters which are of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated. This account of you we have from all quarters received. Be in your chamber then at that hour, and do not take it amiss if your visitor wear a mask.”

“this is indeed a mystery,” i remarked. “what do you imagine that it means?”

“1 H4V3 NO D4T4 Y3T. 1T 1S 4 C4P1T4L M1ST4K3 TO TH3OR1Z3 B3FOR3 ON3 H4S D4T4. 1NS3NS1BLY ON3 B3G1NS TO TW1ST F4CTS TO SU1T TH3OR13S, 1NST34D OF TH3OR13S TO SU1T F4CTS. BUT TH3 NOT3 1TS3LF. WH4T DO YOU D3DUC3 FROM 1T?”

i carefully examined the writing, and the paper upon which it was written.

“the man who wrote it was presumably well to do,” i remarked, endeavoring to imitate my companion’s processes. “such paper could not be bought under half a crown a packet. it is peculiarly strong and stiff.”

“P3CUL14R--TH4T 1S TH3 V3RY WORD,” said pyrope. “1T 1S NOT 4N 3NGL1SH P4P3R 4T 4LL. HOLD 1T UP TO TH3 L1GHT.”

i did so, and saw a large “e” with a small “g,” a “p,” and a large “g” with a small “t” woven into the texture of the paper.

“WH4T DO YOU M4K3 OF TH4T?” asked pyrope.

“the name of the maker, no doubt; or his monogram, rather.”

“NOT 4T 4LL. TH3 ‘G’ W1TH TH3 SM4LL ‘T’ ST4NDS FOR ‘G3S3LLSCH4FT,’ WH1CH 1S TH3 G3RM4N FOR ‘COMP4NY.’ 1T 1S 4 CUSTOM4RY CONTR4CT1ON L1K3 OUR ‘CO.’ ‘P,’ OF COURS3, ST4NDS FOR ‘P4P13R.’ NOW FOR TH3 ‘3G.’ L3T US GL4NC3 4T OUR CONT1N3NT4L G4Z3TT33R.” she took down a heavy brown volume from her shelves. “3GLOW, 3GLON1TZ—H3R3 W3 4R3, 3GR14. 1T 1S 1N 4 G3RM4N-SP34K1NG COUNTRY—1N BOH3M14, NOT F4R FROM C4RLSB4D. ‘R3M4RK4BL3 4S B31NG TH3 SC3N3 OF TH3 D34TH OF W4LL3NST31N, 4ND FOR 1TS NUM3ROUS GL4SS-F4CTOR13S 4ND P4P3R-M1LLS.’ H4, H4, MY BOY, WH4T DO YOU M4K3 OF TH4T?” her eyes sparkled, and she sent up a great blue triumphant cloud from her cigarette.

“the paper was made in bohemia,” i said.

“PR3C1S3LY. 4ND TH3 M4N WHO WROT3 TH3 NOT3 1S 4 G3RM4N. DO YOU NOT3 TH3 P3CUL14R CONSTRUCT1ON OF TH3 S3NT3NC3--‘TH1S 4CCOUNT OF YOU W3 H4V3 FROM 4LL QU4RT3RS R3C31V3D.’ 4 FR3NCHM4N OR RUSS14N COULD NOT H4V3 WR1TT3N TH4T. 1T 1S TH3 G3RM4N WHO 1S SO UNCOURT3OUS TO H1S V3RBS. 1T ONLY R3M41NS, TH3R3FOR3, TO D1SCOV3R WH4T 1S W4NT3D BY TH1S G3RM4N WHO WR1T3S UPON BOH3M14N P4P3R 4ND PR3F3RS W34R1NG 4 M4SK TO SHOW1NG H1S F4C3. 4ND H3R3 H3 COM3S, 1F 1 4M NOT M1ST4K3N, TO R3SOLV3 4LL OUR DOUBTS.”

as she spoke there was the sharp sound of horses’ hoofs and grating wheels against the curb, followed by a sharp pull at the bell. pyrope whistled.

“4 P41R, BY TH3 SOUND,” said she. “Y3S,” she continued, glancing out of the window. “4 N1C3 L1TTL3 BROUGH4M 4ND 4 P41R OF B34UT13S. 4 HUNDR3D 4ND F1FTY GU1N34S 4P13C3. TH3R3’S MON3Y 1N TH1S C4S3, 3GB3RT, 1F TH3R3 1S NOTH1NG 3LS3.”

“i think that i had better go, pyrope.”

“NOT 4 B1T, DOCTOR. ST4Y WH3R3 YOU 4R3. 1 4M LOST W1THOUT MY BOSW3L. 4ND TH1S PROM1S3S TO B3 1NT3R3ST1NG. 1T WOULD B3 4 P1TY TO M1SS 1T.”

“but your client--”

“N3V3R M1ND H1M. 1 M4Y W4NT YOUR H3LP, 4ND SO M4Y H3. H3R3 H3 COM3S. S1T DOWN 1N TH4T 4RMCH41R, DOCTOR, 4ND G1V3 US YOUR B3ST 4TT3NT1ON.”

a slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage, paused immediately outside the door. then there was a loud and authoritative tap.

“COM3 1N!” said pyrope.

a man entered who was stunningly beautiful, with the chest and limbs of a hercules, and yet his features were oddly familiar in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, mask or no. his dress was rich with a richness which would, in england, be looked upon as akin to bad taste. heavy bands of astrakhan were slashed across the sleeves and fronts of his double-breasted coat, while the deep blue cloak which was thrown over his shoulders was lined with flame-coloured silk and secured at the neck with a brooch which consisted of a single flaming beryl. boots which extended halfway up his calves, and which were trimmed at the tops with rich brown fur, completed the impression of barbaric opulence which was suggested by his whole appearance. he carried a broad-brimmed hat in his hand, while he wore across the upper part of his face, extending down past the cheekbones, a black vizard mask, which he had apparently adjusted that very moment, for his hand was still raised to it as he entered.

“You had my note?” he asked with a strongly marked german accent. “I told you that i would call.” he looked to me briefly, then looked away, as though he didn’t want to inquire as to my presence.

“PR4Y T4K3 4 S34T,” said pyrope. “TH1S 1S MY FR13ND 4ND COLL34GU3, DR. 3GB3RT, WHO 1S OCC4S1ON4LLY GOOD 3NOUGH TO H3LP M3 1N MY C4S3S.”

“Ah. A doctor,” said our visitor, and i saw him relax minutely in that familiar way that meant that he had decided that since i had a perfectly valid excuse for operating outside my species--after all, healers have been taking advantage of the fact that trolls cannot catch human diseases _et vice versa_ to ply our trade with impunity since the days of gilgamesh--i was probably not a deviant.

pyrope ignored this. “WHOM H4V3 1 TH3 HONOUR TO 4DDR3SS?”

“You may address me as the count von kramm, a bohemian nobleman. I understand that this gentleman, your friend, is a man of honour and discretion, whom i may trust with a matter of the most extreme importance. If not, i should much prefer to communicate with you alone.”

i rose to go, but pyrope caught me by the wrist and pushed me back into my chair. “1T 1S BOTH, OR NON3,” said she. “YOU M4Y S4Y B3FOR3 TH1S G3NTL3M4N 4NYTH1NG WH1CH YOU M4Y S4Y TO M3.”

the count shrugged his broad shoulders. “Then i must begin,” said he, “by binding you both to absolute secrecy for two years; at the end of that time the matter will be of no importance. At present it is not too much to say that it is of such weight it may have an influence upon european history.”

“1 PROM1S3,” said pyrope.

“and i.”

“You will excuse this mask,” continued our strange visitor. “The august person who employs me wishes his agent to be unknown to you, and i may confess at once that the title by which i have just called myself is not exactly my own.”

“1 W4S 4W4R3 OF 1T,” said pyrope dryly.

“The circumstances are of great delicacy, and every precaution has to be taken to quench what might grow to be an immense scandal and seriously compromise one of the reigning families of europe. To speak plainly, the matter implicates the great house of ormstein, hereditary kings of bohemia.”

“1 W4S 4LSO 4W4R3 OF TH4T,” murmured pyrope, settling herself down in her armchair and closing her eyes.

our visitor glanced with some apparent surprise at the languid, lounging figure of the troll who had been no doubt depicted to him as the most incisive reasoner and most energetic agent in europe. pyrope slowly reopened her eyes and “looked” impatiently at her client.

“1F YOUR M4J3STY WOULD COND3SC3ND TO ST4T3 YOUR C4S3,” she remarked, “1 SHOULD B3 B3TT3R 4BL3 TO 4DV1S3 YOU.”

the man sprang from his chair and paced up and down the room in uncontrollable agitation. then, with a gesture of desperation, he tore the mask from his face and hurled it upon the ground. “You are right,” he cried; “I am the king. Why should i attempt to conceal it?”

“WHY, 1ND33D?” murmured pyrope. “YOUR M4J3STY H4D NOT SPOK3N B3FOR3 1 W4S 4W4R3 TH4T 1 W4S 4DDR3SS1NG J4K3 GOTTSR31CH S1G1SMOND 3NGL1SH VON ORMST31N, GR4ND DUK3 OF C4SS3L-F3LST31N, 4ND H3R3D1T4RY K1NG OF BOH3M14.”

i did not inquire as to our strange visitor’s, well, english-sounding names; if you are familiar with the genealogy then the reasoning for it becomes quite apparent, if admittedly still an odd choice.

“But you can understand,” said the king, sitting down once more and passing his hand over his high white forehead, “you can understand that i am not accustomed to doing such business in my own person. Yet the matter was so delicate that i could not confide it to an agent without putting myself in his power. I have come _incognito_ from prague for the purpose of consulting you.”

“TH3N, PR4Y CONSULT,” said pyrope, shutting her eyes once more.

“The facts are briefly these: some five years ago, during a lengthy visit to warsaw, i made the acquaintance of the well-known adventuress, aradia megido. the name is no doubt familiar to you.”

“K1NDLY LOOK H3R UP 1N MY 1ND3X, DOCTOR,” murmured pyrope without opening her eyes. for many years she had adopted a system of docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to name a subject or a person on which she could not at once furnish information. in this case i found her biography sandwiched in between that of a hebrew rabbi and that of a staff-commander who had written a monograph upon the deep-sea fishes.

“L3T M3 S33!” said pyrope. “HUM! H4TCH3D 1N N3W J3RS3Y--TH4T _WOULD_ 3XPL41N HOW 4 RUSTBLOOD ROS3 TO SUCH PROM1N4NC3--1N TH3 Y34R 1858. 4DV3NTUR3SS...4CTR3SS...OP3R4 S1NG3R...R3T1R3D 4ND L1V1NG 1N LONDON--QU1T3 SO! YOUR M4J3STY, 4S 1 UND3RST4ND, B3C4M3 3NT4NGL3D W1TH TH1S YOUNG P3RSON, WROT3 H3R SOM3 COMPROM1S1NG L3TT3RS, 4ND 1S NOW D3S1ROUS OF G3TT1NG THOS3 L3TT3RS B4CK.”

“Precisely so. But how--?”

“W4S TH3R3 4 S3CR3T M4RR14G3?”

“None.”

“NO L3G4L P4P3RS OR C3RT1F1C4T3S?”

“None.”

“TH3N 1 F41L TO FOLLOW YOUR M4J3STY. 1F TH1S YOUNG P3RSON SHOULD PRODUC3 H3R L3TT3RS FOR BL4CKM41L1NG OR OTH3R PURPOS3S, HOW 1S SH3 TO PROV3 TH31R 4UTH3NT1C1TY? 4ND 1T’S NOT 4S THOUGH SH3 W3R3 4 M4N--1 KNOW SUCH TH1NGS M4TT3R TO YOU HUM4NS.”

“There is the writing.”

“POOH, POOH! FORG3RY.”

“My private note-paper.”

“STOL3N.”

“My own seal.”

“1M1T4T3D.”

“My photograph.”

“BOUGHT.”

“We were both in the photograph.”

“OH, D34R! TH4T 1S V3RY B4D! YOUR M4J3STY H4S 1ND33D COMM1TT3D 4N 1ND1SCR3T1ON.”

“I was mad--insane.”

“YOU H4V3 COMPROM1S3D YOURS3LF S3R1OUSLY.”

“I was only crown prince then. I was young. I am but thirty now.”

“1T MUST B3 R3COV3R3D.”

“We have tried and failed.”

“YOUR M4J3STY MUST P4Y. 1T MUST B3 BOUGHT.”

“She will not sell.”

“STOL3N, TH3N.”

“Five attempts have been made. Twice burglars in my pay ransacked her house. Once we diverted her luggage when she travelled. twice she has been waylaid. There has been no result.”

“NO S1GN OF 1T?”

“Absolutely none.”

pyrope laughed. “1T 1S QU1T3 4 PR3TTY L1TTL3 PROBL3M,” said she.

“But a very serious one to me,” returned the king reproachfully.

“V3RY, 1ND33D. 4ND WH4T DO3S SH3 PROPOS3 TO DO W1TH TH3 PHOTOGR4PH?”

“To ruin me.”

“BUT HOW?”

“I am about to be married.”

“SO 1 H4V3 H34RD.”

“To jane crocker von saxe-meningen, second daughter of the king of scandinavia. You may know the strict principles of her family. She is herself the very soul of delicacy. A shadow of a doubt as to my conduct would bring the matter to an end.”

“4ND 4R4D14 M3G1DO?”

“Threatens to send them the photograph. And she will do it. I know that she will do it. You do not know her, but she has a soul of steel. She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men. Rather than i should marry another woman, there are no lengths to which she would not go--none.”

“YOU 4R3 SUR3 TH4T SH3 H4S NOT S3NT 1T Y3T?”

“I am sure.”

“4ND WHY?”

“Because she has said that she would send it on the day when the betrothal was publicly proclaimed. That will be next monday.”

“OH, TH3N W3 H4V3 THR33 D4YS Y3T,” said pyrope with a yawn. “TH4T 1S V3RY FORTUN4T3, 4S 1 H4V3 ON3 OR TWO M4TT3RS OF 1MPORT4NC3 TO LOOK 1NTO JUST 4T PR3S3NT. YOUR M4J3STY W1LL, OF COURS3, ST4Y 1N LONDON FOR TH3 PR3S3NT?”

“Certainly. You will find me at the langham under the name of the count von kramm.”

“TH3N 1 SH4LL DROP YOU 4 L1N3 TO L3T YOU KNOW HOW W3 PROGR3SS.”

“Pray do so. I shall be all anxiety.”

“TH3N, 4S TO MON3Y?”

“You have _carte blanche_.”

“4BSOLUT3LY?”

“I tell you that i would give one of the provinces of my kingdom to have that photograph.”

“4ND FOR PR3S3NT 3XP3NS3S?”

the king took a heavy chamois leather bag from under his cloak and laid it on the table.

“There are three hundred pounds in gold and seven hundred in notes,” he said.

pyrope scribbled a receipt upon a sheet of her note book and handed it to him.

“4ND M4D3MO1S3LL3’S 4DDR3SS?” she asked.

“Is briony lodge, serpentine avenue, st. john’s wood.”

pyrope took a note of it. “ON3 OTH3R QU3ST1ON,” said she. “W4S TH3 PHOTOGR4PH 4 C4B1N3T?”

“It was.”

“TH3N, GOOD-N1GHT, YOUR M4J3STY, 4ND 1 TRUST TH4T W3 SH4LL SOON H4V3 SOM3 GOOD N3WS FOR YOU. 4ND GOOD-N1GHT, 3GB3RT,” she added, as the wheels of the royal brougham rolled down the street. “1F YOU W1LL B3 GOOD 3NOUGH TO C4LL TO-MORROW N1GHT 4T THR33 O’CLOCK 1 SHOULD L1K3 TO CH4T TH1S L1TTL3 M4TT3R OV3R W1TH YOU.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The font I selected for this chapter, for reasons including but not limited to the obvious, was Baskerville, but it's not showing up as such in my browser at least. Oh well.
> 
> Formatting the chapter tens (chapters ten?) was a real chore (especially since Google Docs and AO3 don't mix, apparently, so I had to do it all _twice_), but I mean, I had to do _something_\--minor to medium edits and running the text through various quirk generators is the only thing between me and just straight up passing off Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work as my own for much of this.
> 
> Yeah but no seriously though I learned CSS primarily in order to make this chapter look like this. Like, I wouldn't have been _happy_ using the standard Homestuck skin on the divisible-by-three chapters, but I'd have managed--it wouldn't have killed me to give the narrators troll colors or Randy one of the grey pallets. This shit, though? Flatly impossible.
> 
> What'd be really neat would be if I could add ACD as a coauthor (akin to how _Pride and Prejudice and Zombies_ is supposedly authored by some guy _and_ Jane Austin), but only on these specific chapters.


	12. Chapter 10 Chapter 2

at three o’clock precisely i was at baker street, but pyrope had not yet returned. ms. lalonde informed me that she had left the house shortly after eight o’clock in the evening. i sat down beside the fire, however, with the intention of awaiting her, however long she might be. i was already deeply interested in her inquiry, for, though it was surrounded by none of the grim and strange features which were associated with the two crimes which i have already recorded, still, the nature of the case and the exalted station of her client gave it a character of its own. indeed, apart from the nature of the investigation which my friend had on hand, there was something in her masterly grasp of a situation, and her keen, incisive reasoning, which made it a pleasure to me to study her system of work, and to follow the quick, subtle methods by which she disentangled the most inextricable mysteries. so accustomed was i to her invariable success that the very possibility of her failing had ceased to enter into my head.

it was close upon four before the door opened, and a drunken-looking groom, ill-kempt with an inflamed face and disreputable clothes, walked into the room. accustomed as i was to my friend’s amazing powers in the use of disguises, i had to look three times before i was certain that it was indeed she, or indeed a woman at all. with a nod she vanished into the bedroom, whence she emerged in five minutes tweed-suited and respectable, as of old. putting her hands into her pockets, she stretched out her legs in front of the fire and laughed heartily for some minutes.

“W3LL, R34LLY!” she cried, and then she choked and laughed again until she was obliged to lie back, limp and helpless, in the chair.

“what is it?”

“1T’S QU1T3 TOO FUNNY. 1 4M SUR3 YOU COULD N3V3R GU3SS HOW 1 3MPLOY3D MY MORN1NG, OR WH4T 1 3ND3D BY DO1NG.”

“i can’t imagine. i suppose that you have been watching the habits, and perhaps the house, of miss aradia megido.”

“QU1T3 SO; BUT TH3 S3QU3L W4S R4TH3R UNUSU4L. 1 W1LL T3LL YOU, HOW3V3R. 1 L3FT TH3 HOUS3 4 L1TTL3 4FT3R 31GHT O’CLOCK TH1S 3V3N1NG 1N TH3 CH4R4CT3R OF 4 GROOM OUT OF WORK. TH3R3 1S 4 WOND3RFUL SYMP4THY 4ND FR33M4SONRY 4MONG HORS3Y M3N. B3 ON3 OF TH3M, 4ND YOU W1LL KNOW 4LL TH4T TH3R3 1S TO KNOW. 1 SOON FOUND BR1ONY LODG3. 1T 1S 4 B1JOU V1LL4, W1TH 4 G4RD3N 4T TH3 B4CK, BUT BU1LT OUT 1N FRONT R1GHT UP TO TH3 RO4D, TWO STOR13S. CHUBB LOCK TO TH3 DOOR. L4RG3 S1TT1NG-ROOM ON TH3 R1GHT S1D3, W3LL FURN1SH3D, W1TH LONG W1NDOWS 4LMOST TO TH3 FLOOR, 4ND THOS3 PR3POST3ROUS 3NGL1SH W1NDOW F4ST3N3RS WH1CH 4 CH1LD COULD OP3N. B3H1ND TH3R3 W4S NOTH1NG R3M4RK4BL3, S4V3 TH4T TH3 P4SS4G3 W1NDOW COULD B3 R34CH3D FROM TH3 TOP OF TH3 CO4CH-HOUS3. 1 W4LK3D ROUND 1T 4ND 3X4M1N3D 1T CLOS3LY FROM 3V3RY PO1NT OF V13W, BUT W1THOUT NOT1NG 4NYTH1NG 3LS3 OF 1NT3R3ST.

“1 TH3N LOUNG3D DOWN TH3 STR33T 4ND FOUND, 4S 1 3XP3CT3D, TH4T TH3R3 W4S 4 M3WS 1N 4 L4N3 WH1CH RUNS DOWN BY ON3 W4LL OF TH3 G4RD3N. 1 L3NT TH3 OSTL3RS 4 H4ND 1N RUBB1NG DOWN TH31R HORS3S, 4ND R3C31V3D 1N 3XCH4NG3 TWOP3NC3, 4 GL4SS OF H4LF-4ND-H4LF, TWO F1LLS OF SH4G TOB4CCO, 4ND 4S MUCH 1NFORM4T1ON 4S 1 COULD D3S1R3 4BOUT M1SS M3G1DO, TO S4Y NOTH1NG OF H4LF 4 DOZ3N OTH3R P3OPL3 1N TH3 N31GHBOURHOOD 1N WHOM 1 W4S NOT 1N TH3 L34ST 1NT3R3ST3D, BUT WHOS3 B1OGR4PH13S 1 W4S COMP3LL3D TO L1ST3N TO.”

“and what of aradia megido?” i asked.

“OH, SH3 H4S TURN3D 4LL TH3 H34DS DOWN 1N TH4T P4RT. SH3 1S TH3 D41NT13ST TH1NG UND3R 4 BONN3T ON TH1S PL4N3T. SO S4Y TH3 S3RP3NT1N3-M3WS, TO 4 M4N. SH3 L1V3S QU13TLY, S1NGS 4T CONC3RTS, DR1V3S OUT 4T F1V3 3V3RY D4Y, 4ND R3TURNS 4T S3V3N SH4RP FOR D1NN3R. S3LDOM GO3S OUT 4T OTH3R T1M3S, 3XC3PT WH3N SH3 S1NGS OR TO V1S1T TH3 4RCH3OLOG1C4L D1G 1N PUTN3Y H34TH--1'M G1V3N TO UND3RST4ND TH3Y FOUND 4 CR4SH3D D3RS1T3 OR PROSP1T14N F1GHT3RCR4FT. SH3 H4S S33N 4 GOOD D34L OF 4 C3RT41N M4L3 V1S1TOR. H3 N3V3R C4LLS L3SS TH4N ONC3 4 D4Y, 4ND OFT3N TW1C3. H3 1S 4 MR. SOLLUX C4PTOR, OF TH3 1NN3R T3MPL3. S33 TH3 4DV4NT4G3S OF 4 C4BM4N 4S 4 CONF1D4NT. TH3Y H4D DR1V3N H1M HOM3 4 DOZ3N T1M3S FROM S3RP3NT1N3-M3WS, 4ND KN3W 4LL 4BOUT H1M. WH3N 1 H4D L1ST3N3D TO 4LL TH3Y H4D TO T3LL, 1 B3G4N TO W4LK UP 4ND DOWN N34R BR1ONY LODG3 ONC3 MOR3, 4ND TO TH1NK OV3R MY PL4N OF C4MP41GN.

“TH1S SOLLUX C4PTOR W4S 3V1D3NTLY 4N 1MPORT4NT F4CTOR 1N TH3 M4TT3R. H3 W4S 4 L4WY3R. TH4T SOUND3D OM1NOUS. WH4T W4S TH3 R3L4T1ON B3TW33N TH3M, 4ND WH4T TH3 OBJ3CT OF H1S R3P34T3D V1S1TS? W4S SH3 H1S CL13NT, H1S FR13ND, OR H1S M1STR3SS? 1F TH3 FORM3R, SH3 H4D PROB4BLY TR4NSF3RR3D TH3 PHOTOGR4PH TO H1S K33P1NG. 1F TH3 L4TT3R, 1T W4S L3SS L1K3LY. ON TH3 1SSU3 OF TH1S QU3ST1ON D3P3ND3D WH3TH3R 1 SHOULD CONT1NU3 MY WORK 4T BR1ONY LODG3, OR TURN MY 4TT3NT1ON TO TH3 G3NTL3M4N’S CH4MB3RS 1N TH3 T3MPL3. 1T W4S 4 D3L1C4T3 PO1NT, 4ND 1T W1D3N3D TH3 F13LD OF MY 1NQU1RY. 1 F34R TH4T 1 BOR3 YOU W1TH TH3S3 D3T41LS, BUT 1 H4V3 TO L3T YOU S33 MY L1TTL3 D1FF1CULT13S, 1F YOU 4R3 TO UND3RST4ND TH3 S1TU4T1ON. ”

“i am following you closely,” i answered.

“1 W4S ST1LL B4L4NC1NG TH3 M4TT3R 1N MY M1ND WH3N 4 H4NSOM C4B DROV3 UP TO BR1ONY LODG3, 4ND 4 G3NTL3M4N SPR4NG OUT--3V1D3NTLY TH3 M4N OF WHOM 1 H4D H34RD. H3 4PP34R3D TO B3 1N 4 GR34T HURRY, SHOUT3D TO TH3 C4BM4N TO W41T, 4ND BRUSH3D P4ST TH3 M41D WHO OP3N3D TH3 DOOR W1TH TH3 41R OF 4 M4N WHO W4S THOROUGHLY 4T HOM3.

“H3 W4S 1N TH3 HOUS3 4BOUT H4LF 4N HOUR, 4ND 1 COULD C4TCH GL1MPS3S OF H1M 1N TH3 W1NDOWS OF TH3 S1TT1NG-ROOM, P4C1NG UP 4ND DOWN, T4LK1NG 3XC1T3DLY, 4ND W4V1NG H1S 4RMS. OF H3R 1 COULD S33 NOTH1NG. PR3S3NTLY H3 3M3RG3D, LOOK1NG 3V3N MOR3 FLURR13D TH4N B3FOR3. 4S H3 ST3PP3D UP TO TH3 C4B, H3 PULL3D 4 GOLD W4TCH FROM H1S POCK3T 4ND LOOK3D 4T 1T 34RN3STLY, ‘driive liike the deviil,’ H3 SHOUT3D, ‘fiir2t two gro22 & hankey’2 iin regent 2treet, and then two the church of 2t. moniica iin the edgeware road. half a guiinea iif you do iit iin twenty miinute2!’

“4W4Y TH3Y W3NT, 4ND 1 W4S JUST WOND3R1NG WH3TH3R 1 SHOULD NOT DO W3LL TO FOLLOW TH3M WH3N UP TH3 L4N3 C4M3 4 N34T L1TTL3 L4ND4U, TH3 C4RAP4C14N CO4CHWOM4N W1TH H3R CO4T ONLY H4LF-BUTTON3D, 4ND H3R T13 UND3R H3R 34R, WH1L3 4LL TH3 T4GS OF H3R H4RN3SS W3R3 ST1CK1NG OUT OF TH3 BUCKL3S. 1T H4DN’T PULL3D UP B3FOR3 4R4D14 M3G1DO SHOT OUT OF TH3 H4LL DOOR 4ND 1NTO 1T.

“‘the church of st. monica, ms. paint,’ SH3 CR13D, ‘and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.’

“TH1S W4S QU1T3 TOO GOOD TO LOS3, 3GB3RT. 1 W4S JUST B4L4NC1NG WH3TH3R 1 SHOULD RUN FOR 1T, OR WH3TH3R 1 SHOULD P3RCH B3H1ND H3R L4ND4U WH3N 4 C4B C4M3 THROUGH TH3 STR33T. TH3 DR1V3R LOOK3D TW1C3 4T SUCH 4 SH4BBY F4R3, BUT 1 JUMP3D 1N B3FOR3 H3 COULD OBJ3CT. ‘TH3 CHURCH OF ST. MON1C4,’ S41D 1, ‘4ND H4LF 4 SOV3R31GN 1F YOU R34CH 1T 1N TW3NTY M1NUT3S.’ 1T W4S TW3NTY-F1V3 M1NUT3S TO M1DN1GHT, 4ND OF COURS3 1T W4S CL34R 3NOUGH WH4T W4S 1N TH3 W1ND.

“MY C4BBY DROV3 F4ST. 1 DON’T TH1NK 1 3V3R DROV3 F4ST3R, BUT TH3 OTH3RS W3R3 TH3R3 B3FOR3 US. TH3 C4B 4ND TH3 L4ND4U W1TH TH31R ST34M1NG HORS3S W3R3 1N FRONT OF TH3 DOOR WH3N 1 4RR1V3D. 1 P41D TH3 M4N 4ND HURR13D 1NTO TH3 CHURCH. TH3R3 W4S NOT 4 SOUL TH3R3 S4V3 TH3 TWO WHOM 1 H4D FOLLOW3D 4ND 4 SURPL1C3D CL3RGYM4N, WHO S33M3D TO B3 3XPOSTUL4T1NG W1TH TH3M. TH3Y W3R3 4LL THR33 ST4ND1NG 1N 4 KNOT 1N FRONT OF TH3 4LT4R. 1 LOUNG3D UP TH3 S1D3 41SL3 L1K3 4NY OTH3R 1DL3R WHO H4S DROPP3D 1NTO 4 CHURCH. SUDD3NLY, TO MY SURPR1S3, TH3 THR33 4T TH3 4LT4R F4C3D ROUND TO M3, 4ND SOLLUX C4PTOR C4M3 RUNN1NG 4S H4RD 4S H3 COULD TOW4RDS M3.

“‘thank god,’ H3 CR13D. ‘you’ll do. come! come’

“‘WH4T TH3N?’ 1 4SK3D.

“‘come, man, come, only three miinute2, or iit won’t be legal.’

“1 W4S H4LF-DR4GG3D UP TO TH3 4LT4R, 4ND B3FOR3 1 KN3W WH3R3 1 W4S 1 FOUND MYS3LF MUMBL1NG R3SPONS3S WH1CH W3R3 WH1SP3R3D 1N MY 34R, 4ND VOUCH1NG FOR TH1NGS OF WH1CH 1 KN3W NOTH1NG, 4ND G3N3R4LLY 4SS1ST1NG 1N TH3 S3CUR3 TY1NG UP OF 4R4D14 M3G1DO, SP1NST3R, TO SOLLUX C4PTOR, B4CH3LOR. 1T W4S 4LL DON3 1N 4N 1NST4NT, 4ND TH3R3 W4S TH3 G3NTL3M4N TH4NK1NG M3 ON TH3 ON3 S1D3 4ND TH3 L4DY ON TH3 OTH3R, WH1L3 TH3 CL3RGYM4N B34M3D ON M3 1N FRONT. 1T W4S TH3 MOST PR3POST3ROUS POS1T1ON 1N WH1CH 1 3V3R FOUND MYS3LF 1N MY L1F3, 4ND 1T W4S TH3 THOUGHT OF 1T TH4T ST4RT3D M3 L4UGH1NG JUST NOW. 1T S33MS TH4T TH3R3 H4D B33N SOM3 1NFORM4L1TY 4BOUT TH31R L1C3NS3, TH4T TH3 CL3RGYM4N 4BSOLUT3LY R3FUS3D TO M4RRY TH3M W1THOUT 4 W1TN3SS OF SOM3 SORT, 4ND TH4T MY LUCKY 4PP34R4NC3 S4V3D TH3 BR1D3GROOM FROM H4V1NG TO S4LLY OUT 1NTO TH3 STR33TS 1N S34RCH OF 4 B3ST M4N. TH3 BR1D3 G4V3 M3 4 SOV3R31GN, 4ND 1 M34N TO W34R 1T ON MY W4TCH CH41N 1N M3MORY OF TH3 OCC4S1ON.”

“this is a very unexpected turn of affairs,” said i; “and what then?”

“W3LL, 1 FOUND MY PL4NS V3RY S3R1OUSLY M3N4C3D. 1T LOOK3D 4S 1F TH3 P41R M1GHT T4K3 4N 1MM3D14T3 D3P4RTUR3, 4ND SO N3C3SS1T4T3 V3RY PROMPT 4ND 3N3RG3T1C M34SUR3S ON MY P4RT. 4T TH3 CHURCH DOOR, HOW3V3R, TH3Y S3P4R4T3D, H3 DR1V1NG B4CK TO TH3 T3MPL3, 4ND SH3 TO H3R OWN HOUS3. ‘i shall drive out in the park at five as usual,’ SH3 S41D 4S SH3 L3FT H1M. 1 H34RD NO MOR3. TH3Y DROV3 4W4Y 1N D1FF3R3NT D1R3CT1ONS, 4ND 1 W3NT OFF TO M4K3 MY OWN 4RR4NG3M3NTS.”

“which are?”

“SOM3 COLD B33F 4ND 4 GL4SS OF B33R, ” she answered, ringing the bell. “1 H4V3 B33N TOO BUSY TO TH1NK OF FOOD, 4ND 1 4M L1K3LY TO B3 BUS13R ST1LL TH1S MORN1NG. BY TH3 W4Y, DOCTOR, 1 SH4LL W4NT YOUR CO-OP3R4T1ON.”

“i shall be delighted.”

“YOU DON’T M1ND BR34K1NG TH3 L4W?”

“not in the least.”

“NOR RUNN1NG 4 CH4NC3 OF 4RR3ST?”

“not in a good cause.”

“OH, TH3 C4US3 1S 3XC3LL3NT!”

“then i am your man.”

“1 W4S SUR3 TH4T 1 M1GHT R3LY ON YOU.”

“but what is it you wish?”

“WH3N MS. M4RY4M H4S BROUGHT 1N TH3 TR4Y 1 W1LL M4K3 1T CL34R TO YOU. NOW, ” she said as she turned hungrily on the simple fare that our landlady had provided, “1 MUST D1SCUSS 1T WH1L3 1 34T, FOR 1 H4V3 NOT MUCH T1M3. 1T 1S N34RLY F1V3 NOW. 1N TWO HOURS W3 MUST B3 ON TH3 SC3N3 OF 4CT1ON. M1SS M3G1DO R3TURNS FROM H3R DR1V3 4T S3V3N. W3 MUST B3 4T BR1ONY LODG3 TO M33T H3R.”

“and what then?”

“YOU MUST L34V3 TH4T TO M3. 1 H4V3 4LR34DY 4RR4NG3D WH4T 1S TO OCCUR. TH3R3 1S ONLY ON3 PO1NT ON WH1CH 1 MUST 1NS1ST. YOU MUST NOT 1NT3RF3R3, COM3 WH4T M4Y. YOU UND3RST4ND?”

“i am to be neutral?”

“TO DO NOTH1NG WH4T3V3R. TH3R3 W1LL PROB4BLY B3 SOM3 SM4LL UNPL34S4NTN3SS. DO NOT JO1N 1N 1T. 1T W1LL 3ND 1N MY B31NG CONV3Y3D 1NTO TH3 HOUS3. FOUR OR F1V3 M1NUT3S 4FT3RW4RDS TH3 S1TT1NG-ROOM W1NDOW W1LL OP3N. YOU 4R3 TO ST4T1ON YOURS3LF CLOS3 TO TH4T OP3N W1NDOW.”

“yes.”

“YOU 4R3 TO W4TCH M3, FOR 1 W1LL B3 V1S1BL3 TO YOU.”

“yes.”

“4ND WH3N 1 R41S3 MY H4ND--SO--YOU W1LL THROW 1NTO TH3 ROOM WH4T 1 G1V3 YOU TO THROW, 4ND W1LL, 4T TH3 S4M3 T1M3, R41S3 TH3 CRY OF F1R3. YOU QU1T3 FOLLOW M3? ”

“entirely.”

“1T 1S NOTH1NG V3RY FORM1D4BL3,” she said, taking a long cigar-shaped roll from her pocket. “1T 1S 4N ORD1N4RY PLUMB3R’S SMOK3-ROCK3T, F1TT3D W1TH 4 C4P 4T 31TH3R 3ND TO M4K3 1T S3LF-L1GHT1NG. YOUR T4SK 1S CONF1N3D TO TH4T. WH3N YOU R41S3 YOUR CRY OF F1R3, 1T W1LL B3 T4K3N UP BY QU1T3 4 NUMB3R OF P3OPL3. YOU M4Y TH3N W4LK TO TH3 3ND OF TH3 STR33T, 4ND 1 W1LL R3JO1N YOU 1N T3N M1NUT3S. 1 HOP3 TH4T 1 H4V3 M4D3 MYS3LF CL34R?”

“i am to remain neutral, to get near the window, to watch you, and at the signal to throw in this object, then to raise the cry of fire, and to wait you at the corner of the street.”

“PR3C1S3LY.”

“then you may entirely rely on me.”

“TH4T 1S 3XC3LL3NT. 1 TH1NK, P3RH4PS, 1T 1S 4LMOST T1M3 TH4T 1 PR3P4R3 FOR TH3 N3W ROL3 1 H4V3 TO PL4Y.”

she disappeared into her bedroom and returned in a few minutes in the character of an amiable and simple-minded nonconformist clergyman. her broad black hat, her baggy trousers, her white tie, her sympathetic smile, and general look of peering and benevolent curiosity were such as mr. john hare alone could have equalled. it was not merely that pyrope changed her costume, even into that of the opposite sex. her expression, her manner, her very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that she assumed. the stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when she became a specialist in crime.

it was a quarter past six when we left baker street, and it still wanted ten minutes to the hour when we found ourselves in serpentine avenue. it was already dawn, and the lamps were just being extinguished as we paced up and down in front of briony lodge, waiting for the coming of its occupant. the house was just such as i had pictured it from terezi pyrope’s succinct description, but the locality appeared to be less private than i expected. on the contrary, for a small street in a quiet neighbourhood, it was remarkably animated. it was quite the cosmopolitan crowd--humans and trolls, carapacians both white and black, nakodiles, salamanders, and turtles all meandered down the street. there was a group of shabbily dressed folks smoking and laughing in a corner, a scissors-grinder with his wheel, two guardsmen who were flirting with a nurse-girl, and several well-dressed young men who were lounging up and down with cigars in their mouths.

“YOU S33, ” remarked pyrope, as we paced to and fro in front of the house, “TH1S M4RR14G3 R4TH3R S1MPL1F13S M4TT3RS. TH3 PHOTOGR4PH B3COM3S 4 DOUBL3-3DG3D W34PON NOW. TH3 CH4NC3S 4R3 TH4T SH3 WOULD B3 4S 4V3RS3 TO 1TS B31NG S33N BY MR. SOLLUX C4PTOR, 4S OUR CL13NT 1S TO 1TS COM1NG TO TH3 3Y3S OF H1S PR1NC3SS. NOW TH3 QU3ST1ON 1S, WH3R3 4R3 W3 TO F1ND TH3 PHOTOGR4PH?”

“where, indeed?”

“1T 1S MOST UNL1K3LY TH4T SH3 C4RR13S 1T 4BOUT W1TH H3R. 1T 1S C4B1N3T S1Z3. TOO L4RG3 FOR 34SY CONC34LM3NT 4BOUT 4 WOM4N’S DR3SS. SH3 KNOWS TH4T TH3 K1NG 1S C4P4BL3 OF H4V1NG H3R W4YL41D 4ND S34RCH3D. TWO 4TT3MPTS OF TH3 SORT H4V3 4LR34DY B33N M4D3. W3 M4Y T4K3 1T, TH3N, TH4T SH3 DO3S NOT C4RRY 1T 4BOUT W1TH H3R.”

“where, then?”

“H3R B4NK3R OR H3R L4WY3R. TH3R3 1S TH4T DOUBL3 POSS1B1L1TY. BUT 1 4M 1NCL1N3D TO TH1NK N31TH3R. RUSTBLOODS 4R3 N4TUR4LLY S3CR3T1V3, 4ND TH3Y L1K3 TO DO TH31R OWN S3CR3T1NG. WHY SHOULD SH3 H4ND 1T OV3R TO 4NYON3 3LS3? SH3 COULD TRUST H3R OWN GU4RD14NSH1P, BUT SH3 COULD NOT T3LL WH4T 1ND1R3CT OR POL1T1C4L 1NFLU3NC3 M1GHT B3 BROUGHT TO B34R UPON 4 BUS1N3SS M4N. B3S1D3S, R3M3MB3R TH4T SH3 H4D R3SOLV3D TO US3 1T W1TH1N 4 F3W D4YS. 1T MUST B3 WH3R3 SH3 C4N L4Y H3R H4NDS UPON 1T. 1T MUST B3 1N H3R OWN HOUS3.”

“but it has twice been burgled.”

“PSH4W! TH3Y D1D NOT KNOW HOW TO LOOK.”

“but how will you look?”

“1 W1LL NOT LOOK.”

“what then?”

“1 W1LL G3T H3R TO SHOW M3. ”

“but she will refuse.”

“SH3 W1LL NOT B3 4BL3 TO. BUT 1 H34R TH3 RUMBL3 OF WH33LS. 1T 1S H3R C4RR14G3. NOW C4RRY OUT MY ORD3RS TO TH3 L3TT3R.”

as she spoke a carriage came round the curve of the avenue. it was a smart little landau which rattled up to the door of briony lodge. as it pulled up, one of the loafing men at the corner dashed forward to open the door in the hope of earning a copper, but was elbowed away by another loafer, who had rushed up with the same intention. a fierce quarrel broke out, which was increased by the two guardsmen, who took sides with one of the loungers, and by the scissors-grinder, who was equally hot upon the other side. a blow was struck, and in an instant the lady, who had stepped from her carriage, was the centre of a little knot of flushed and struggling men, who struck savagely at each other with their fists and sticks. pyrope dashed into the crowd to protect the lady; but, just as she reached her, she gave a cry and dropped to the ground, with the teal blood running freely down her face. at her fall the guardsmen took to their heels in one direction and the loungers in the other, while a number of better dressed people, who had watched the scuffle without taking part in it, crowded in to help the lady and to attend to the injured priest. aradia megido had hurried up the steps; but she stood at the top with her superb figure outlined against the lights of the hall, looking back into the street.

“is the poor gentleman much hurt?” she asked.

“He is dead,” cried several voices.

“no, no, there’s l1fe 1n h1m!” shouted another. “but he’ll be gone before you can get h1m to hosp1tal.”

“He’s a brave fello+w,” said a woman. “They wo+uld have had the lady’s purse and watch if it hadn’t been fo+r him. They were a gang, and a ro+ugh o+ne, to+o+. Ah, he’s breathing no+w.”

“He can’t lie in the street. May we bring him in, marm?”

“surely. bring him into the sitting-room. there is a comfortable sofa. this way, please!”

slowly and solemnly “he” was borne into briony lodge and laid out in the principal room, while i still observed the proceedings from my post by the window. the lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been drawn, so that i could see pyrope as she lay upon the couch. i do not know whether she was seized with compunction at that moment for the part she was playing, but i know that i never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life than when i saw the beautiful creature against whom i was conspiring, or the grace and kindliness with which she waited upon the injured “man.” and yet it would be the blackest treachery to pyrope to draw back now from the part which she had intrusted to me. i hardened my heart, and took the smoke-rocket from under my ulster. after all, i thought, we are not injuring her. we are but preventing her from injuring another.

pyrope had sat up upon the couch, and i saw her motion like a troll who is in need of air. a maid rushed across and threw open the window. at the same instant i saw her raise her hand and at the signal i tossed my rocket into the room with a cry of “fire!” the word was no sooner out of my mouth than the whole crowd of spectators, well dressed and ill--gentlemen, ostlers, and servant maids--joined in a general shriek of “fire!” thick clouds of smoke curled through the room and out at the open window. i caught a glimpse of rushing figures, and a moment later the voice of pyrope from within assuring them that it was a false alarm. slipping through the shouting crowd i made my way to the corner of the street, and in ten minutes was rejoiced to find my friend’s arm in mine, and to get away from the scene of uproar. she walked swiftly and in silence for some few minutes until we had turned down one of the quiet streets which lead towards the edgeware road.

“YOU D1D 1T V3RY N1C3LY, DOCTOR,” she remarked. “NOTH1NG COULD H4V3 B33N B3TT3R. 1T 1S 4LL R1GHT.”

“you have the photograph?”

“1 KNOW WH3R3 1T 1S.”

“and how did you find out?”

“SH3 SHOW3D M3, 4S 1 TOLD YOU SH3 WOULD.”

“i am still in the dark.”

“1 DO NOT W1SH TO M4K3 4 MYST3RY, ” said she, laughing. “TH3 M4TT3R W4S P3RF3CTLY S1MPL3. YOU, OF COURS3, S4W TH4T 3V3RYON3 1N TH3 STR33T W4S 4N 4CCOMPL1C3. TH3Y W3R3 4LL 3NG4G3D FOR TH3 3V3N1NG.”

“i guessed as much.”

“TH3N, WH3N TH3 ROW BROK3 OUT, 1 H4D 4 R4ZOR 1N TH3 P4LM OF MY H4ND. 1 RUSH3D FORW4RD, F3LL DOWN, CL4PP3D MY H4ND TO MY F4C3, 4ND B3C4M3 4 P1T3OUS SP3CT4CL3. 1T 1S 4N OLD TR1CK.”

“that also i could fathom. sadly.”

“TH3N TH3Y C4RR13D M3 1N. SH3 W4S BOUND TO H4V3 M3 1N. WH4T 3LS3 COULD SH3 DO? 4ND 1NTO H3R S1TT1NG-ROOM, WH1CH W4S TH3 V3RY ROOM WH1CH 1 SUSP3CT3D. 1T L4Y B3TW33N TH4T 4ND H3R B3DROOM, 4ND 1 W4S D3T3RM1N3D TO S33 WH1CH. TH3Y L41D M3 ON 4 COUCH, 1 MOT1ON3D FOR 41R, TH3Y W3R3 COMP3LL3D TO OP3N TH3 W1NDOW, 4ND YOU H4D YOUR CH4NC3.”

“how did that help you?”

“1T W4S 4LL-1MPORT4NT. T3LL M3, 3GB3RT--1F YOUR HOUS3 W4S BURN1NG DOWN 4ND YOU C4N S4V3 ONLY ON3 TH1NG, WH4T DO YOU GR4B? ”

“casey.”

“R1GHT, B3C4US3 OF YOUR OV3RWH3LM1NG HUM4N P4R3NT1NG 1NST1NCT. TH3 PO1NT 1S, YOUR 1NST1NCT W4S 4T ONC3 TO RUSH TO TH3 TH1NG WH1CH YOU V4LU3 MOST--4ND 1F YOU H4D N31TH3R W4RD NOR W1F3, 1T WOULD L1K3LY H4V3 B33N 4N OBJ3CT. 1T 1S 4 P3RF3CTLY OV3RPOW3R1NG 1MPULS3 4MONG C3RT41N TYP3S OF P3OPL3, 4ND 1 H4V3 MOR3 TH4N ONC3 T4K3N 4DV4NT4G3 OF 1T. 1N TH3 C4S3 OF TH3 D4RL1NGTON SUBST1TUT1ON SC4ND4L 1T W4S OF US3 TO M3, 4ND 4LSO 1N TH3 4RNSWORTH C4STL3 BUS1N3SS. NOW 1T W4S CL34R TO M3 TH4T OUR L4DY OF TO-D4Y H4D NOTH1NG 1N TH3 HOUS3 MOR3 PR3C1OUS TO H3R TH4N WH4T W3 4R3 1N QU3ST OF. SH3 WOULD RUSH TO S3CUR3 1T. TH3 4L4RM OF F1R3 W4S 4DM1R4BLY DON3. TH3 SMOK3 4ND SHOUT1NG W3R3 3NOUGH TO SH4K3 N3RV3S OF ST33L. SH3 R3SPOND3D B34UT1FULLY. TH3 PHOTOGR4PH 1S 1N 4 R3C3SS B3H1ND 4 SL1D1NG P4N3L JUST 4BOV3 TH3 R1GHT B3LL-PULL. SH3 W4S TH3R3 1N 4N 1NST4NT, 4ND 1 C4UGHT 4 GL1MPS3 OF 1T 4S SH3 H4LF DR3W 1T OUT. WH3N 1 CR13D OUT TH4T 1T W4S 4 F4LS3 4L4RM, SH3 R3PL4C3D 1T, GL4NC3D 4T TH3 ROCK3T, RUSH3D FROM TH3 ROOM, 4ND 1 H4V3 NOT S33N H3R S1NC3. 1 ROS3, 4ND, M4K1NG MY 3XCUS3S, 3SC4P3D FROM TH3 HOUS3. 1 H3S1T4T3D WH3TH3R TO 4TT3MPT TO S3CUR3 TH3 PHOTOGR4PH 4T ONC3; BUT TH3 CO4CHM4N H4D COM3 1N, 4ND 4S H3 W4S W4TCH1NG M3 N4RROWLY, 1T S33M3D S4F3R TO W41T. 4 L1TTL3 OV3R-PR3C1P1T4NC3 M4Y RU1N 4LL. ”

“and now?” i asked.

“OUR QU3ST 1S PR4CT1C4LLY F1N1SH3D. 1 SH4LL C4LL W1TH TH3 K1NG TO-N1GHT, 4ND W1TH YOU, 1F YOU C4R3 TO COM3 W1TH US. W3 W1LL B3 SHOWN 1NTO TH3 S1TT1NG-ROOM TO W41T FOR TH3 L4DY, BUT 1T 1S PROB4BL3 TH4T WH3N SH3 COM3S SH3 M4Y F1ND N31TH3R US NOR TH3 PHOTOGR4PH. 1T M1GHT B3 4 S4T1SF4CT1ON TO H1S M4J3STY TO R3G41N 1T W1TH H1S OWN H4NDS.”

“and when will you call?”

“4T 31GHT 1N TH3 3V3N1NG. SH3 W1LL NOT B3 UP, SO TH4T W3 SH4LL H4V3 4 CL34R F13LD. B3S1D3S, W3 MUST B3 PROMPT, FOR TH1S M4RR14G3 M4Y M34N 4 COMPL3T3 CH4NG3 1N H3R L1F3 4ND H4B1TS. 1 MUST W1R3 TO TH3 K1NG W1THOUT D3L4Y.”

we had reached baker street and had stopped at the door. she was searching her pockets for the key when someone passing said:

“good-night, miss terezi pyrope.”

there were several people on the pavement at the time, but the greeting appeared to come from a slim youth in an ulster who had hurried by.

“1’V3 H34RD TH4T VO1C3 B3FOR3,” said pyrope, staring down the dimly lit street. “NOW, 1 WOND3R WHO TH3 D3UC3 TH4T COULD H4V3 B33N.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone reading this has been here for Rufioh or Porrim and have been waiting this entire time to see how they'd show up this whole time...well, sorry. I also promised there would be four separate Rose Lalondes in the PGenpod discord, and...well, I _told_ you at the time the fourth one wouldn't do much.
> 
> You may have noticed a little bit of lore slipped in here. See, events in the history of this universe have to transpire in a way that leads to all these sentient races existing on this planet that has to be remarkably similar to what our Earth was like in 1888--in some places a carbon copy, though the farther from London one gets the less that is, generally speaking. (Quite literally, everything was leading up to this moment.) So what's the path of least resistance? If you (and by "you" I mean the forces of retrograde causality) have them all evolve on the same planet, you've got to account for the fact that things that evolved under different pressures still have to evolve here presumably for different reasons (for instance, why are trolls nocturnal when the sun isn't a ball of pure murder?), not to mention the fact that nothing is even remotely related to one another (assuming consorts and carapacians even have DNA at all)--but a Precursor civilization of carapacians could easily have recruited primitive aliens into their mercenary forces to fight their endless wars and then gotten wiped out by the selfsame wars, blasting everyone back to the stone age. (As for how modern people know the names by which they called themselves...they don't. The Prospitian and Dersite Star Kingdoms are the modern, English names for these empires--no one knows what they called themselves, or indeed which side was white and which was black. Indeed, even assuming they were homogeneous may be reading "modern" biases into it.)


	13. Chapter 11

Across the street from 221 b Baker Street, there was a bright light that formed itself into several humanoid figures, and then it coalesced into flesh and blood. John let go of the shoulders of two of his friends. Roxy still held the book that they were now in. The outer walls of the building they were in were solid enough, but the interior partitions were translucent, like stained glass.

“Hey, Rose, do you have any idea what’s going on here?” Dave asked.

“This world hasn’t been made yet,” Rose explained. “The less essential something is to the plot, the less...real it is, the more in flux.”

As though to emphasize her point, the walls flickered and then the layout of the building had changed.

“Someone keep an eye on 221 B Baker Street, I’m going to read,” Rose said, grabbing the book. “Alright, the first thing I notice is that a couple of paragraphs have been removed from the beginning, presumably because Terezi’s and Sherlock Holmes’ sexualities don’t mesh. 

“_Ahem._ ‘I had seen little of Pyrope lately....’

“...No mention of cocaine use, I see. Curious....

“...Perhaps the Faygo has replaced the cocaine? I’m going to have to look up what a gasogene is when we get back to somewhere where the internet is a thing....”

...“Wait a second--what’s this about a ‘London slavey’?” Karkat demanded.

“That’s in the original book,” Rose explained. “From context, I assume it’s just an old-timey word for the help.”

“So not, like, actual slaves?”

“No, the slave trade has been illegal for more than half a century at this point.

“‘As to your practice...’

“...This whole interjection about John being a doctor is new, as you might have guessed. On the one hand, this is worrying evidence of species’ segregation in this world; on the other, that tip about it being impossible for trolls and humans to catch the same diseases is _very_ useful information to have…”

Such commentary, by Rose and others, continued on until they had finished the story. In the meantime Dirk, who was watching the window reported the arrival, and then departure of this universe’s Jake.

“The fact that the hemospectrum appears to be a thing in this universe is troubling,” Aradia said.

“Understandable,” said Rose, “but Victorian England was a _very_ class-conscious society. Needless to say, this isn’t where we intend to get our experts from. It gets way better than this.”

“And another thing. So basically these two got together and these two are getting together?” Karkat gestured at John and Roxy and then Jane and Jake. “That didn’t work out that well, last time it happened.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in the epilogues,” Jane said.

“Hey. I’m just saying that it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that you and him hooking up is objectively the worst thing that could happen to either of you. Like Tavros and Vriska getting together, only somehow even worse, which is mighty impressive when you remember that Vriska threw Tavros off a cliff and broke his spine that one time. And then killed him that other time. I would not wish hooking up on you two if you were my worst enemies--in fact, I felt a pang of sympathy for Candy!Jane when _she_ hooked up with Jake English.”

“Look, we have three days to decide whether we want to keep this thing going or run it off the rails. Let’s not be too hasty, but let’s keep looking for more…”

“Red flags?” Karkat asked.

“Well, yeah,” Rose said.

~ ~ ~

After dawn broke and the natives who mattered were all safely in bed, Rose flew up to observe the city. London got less and less real the further from Baker Street one went, with the exception of a few paths--the ones taken by the characters in this piece, presumably. And indeed it turned out to be the case, for they quickly decided that attempting to break into the apartment of a Terezi Pyrope who was channeling the spirit of Sherlock Holmes would be a Darwin Awards-worthy action, and therefore if they wanted clues as to how this world worked they needed to look for them in the places the others were staying.

One path to a brick building with purely decorative faux machicolations and crenelations--any idea that this was meant to be a real castle was given the lie by the many large windows in the facade--that turned out to be Langham. It was easy to find “Count von Kramm’s” rooms when the other names in the ledger were blurry and flickering.

Story!Jake’s habits were diurnal, alas, but fortunately he did not spend his day in his rooms, and so they were able to steal inside and examine his belongings for clues. There were a number of interesting hints about the world that was coalescing around these people, including a cameo panting of Jake’s “parents”, who were complete strangers to the investigators but did look the part.

Rose did risk Baker Street enough to find herself and Kanaya sharing a bed, but not enough to find anything else of note.

The investigators slept for the rest of the day and when they woke up the next night, London was...not solid, but more solid than it had been.

The flickering that signaled the rearrangement of the landscape was occurring less frequently, and while much was still transparent it was less so. The features of the people in the streets were less blurry. They were mostly trolls around Baker Street, mostly humans around the Langham, and mostly trolls again around John’s house, which they visited while John was at Baker Street.

Story!Roxy was at the kitchen table, passed out with a glass of booze in her hands.

The real Terezi grabbed the real Roxy’s arm. “These people aren’t us,” she reminded the staring Roxy. “They’re not even doomed timeline versions of us. They’re just complete strangers who happen to share our DNA.”

Roxy nodded, and they moved on.

Karkat was the first to find it. “Hey, why is the Condesce’s face on these people’s money?” he demanded, waving a one pound note.

The others looked at the loose bills and coins Karkat had found, and indeed her imperious countenance was on all of it.

Rose was shocked at first, then realization dawned and she smacked her head. “I am an idiot.”

“What is it?” John asked.

“John, what do you know about the British Empire?”

John began counting on his fingers. “Let’s see: Highly stratified, class-based society. The largest empire the world has ever known. Um, spread misery pretty much everywhere it went. It was an oceanic power, and it’s strength came from its technology and the might of its navies...oh.”

“Yeah. ‘Oh,’” Rose said. “Kind of obvious, in retrospect, that Meenah Peixes would be drafted to be queen.”

“So you’re telling me that after everything we’ve been through we just turned around and gave Her Imperious Condescension everything she wanted?” Karkat demanded.

“Well, not everything; Britain is still a constitutional monarchy,” Rose said. Then she reconsidered: “Well, I guess I can’t really guarantee that; none of the Sherlock Holmes stories really touch on politics too broadly.”

“I vote that this was a bad idea and we should burn this story to the ground,” Roxy said.

“Seconded,” Karkat announced.

No one objected.

“Now, then, we’re already in the third act--how can we best derail this story?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The thing is that these characters, being natural parts of a "natural" world, all have biological parents/ancestors. Hence the portrait of Jake's parents.
> 
> Of course, in the real timeline Jake and Jane are John's parents and story!Jake, Jane, and John have the exact same genetic code as their counterparts cannot possibly have this familial relationship (especially since every indication is that John and Terezi are older than these people), so what gives?
> 
> Once upon a time, Jake's dad and Jane's mom had an affair, that resulted in a child (John) that was secreted away to England to be given up for adoption. (Presumably this secret shame was the reason Jane's mom raised her so strictly.) And by _staggering_ coincidence, when they had Jake and Jane respectively, they passed on _the exact same genes_ that they did to John--hence why John is genetically half Jane and half Jake. The odds against this are, of course, astronomical, but the thing is that no specific set of gene inheritance is more likely than it (think of it like this: the odds are against you rolling a six on any specific roll, but you're no more likely to roll a five _than_ a six) and nothing mechanically prevents it. The characters are completely unaware of their connection, of course, but this is why John found Jake oddly familiar--he's looked at a face much like Jake's in the mirror every day of his life.
> 
> Rose and Roxy are sisters, as well. This relationship presumably is known, yet John met them coincidentially.
> 
> A gasogene is a Victorian device used to carbonate beverages, by the way.


	14. Chapter 10 Chapter 3

i slept at baker street that night, and we were engaged upon our toast and coffee in the morning when the letter and package came from the king of bohemia.

“what is it, pyrope?” i asked.

“TH3 K1NG S4YS H3’S H4D 4 CH4NG3 OF H34RT 4ND NO LONG3R W1SH3S TO 3NG4G3 MY S3RV1C3S,” pyrope said.

i spluttered. “but we know where the photograph is!” i ejaculated.

“H3 TH4NKS US FOR OUR T1M3 4ND S3NDS TH1S TO COMP3NS4T3 US FOR OUR TROUBL3.” pyrope then opened the package and out spilled a pile of unsorted jewels and foreign currency. “CUR1OUS3R 4ND CUR1OUS3R” she mused. “1 TH1NK 1T WOULD B3HOOV3 US TO H34R OF OUR D1SM1SS4L FROM TH3 K1NG H1MS3LF.”

and so we took a hansom to the langham and found our way to the king’s suite, where pyrope knocked on the door imperiously. i was surprised when the king answered the door himself, but then i suppose he wasn’t likely to be traveling with servants on such a delicate mission.

what was truly shocking was his appearance. it was undoubtedly he, but his clothes didn’t fit properly, as though he had shrunken during the day. he held a kerchief to his mouth before he spoke, muffling his voice. “Oh, um, what are you doing here? I am very sick,” he added by way of explanation of the kerchief.

i could scarcely have blinked in the time it took pyrope to pin the hapless royal to the wall with her sword against his throat.

“WHO 4R3 YOU?” she demanded.

“pyrope!” i exclaimed.

“I am the king!” protested the king.

“YOU M4Y LOOK L1K3 H1M 1N TH3 F4C3, BUT 1T’S CL34R WHO3V3R H1R3D YOU W4S JUDG1NG 3NT1R3LY ON TH4T. MY D34R 1MPOSTOR, YOU 4R3 TWO 1NCH3S TOO SHORT, F1FT33N POUNDS TOO L1GHT, 4ND 4R3 V41NLY 4TT3MPT1NG TO COV3R UP 4N 4M3R1C4N 4CC3NT. NOW WOULD YOU L1K3 TO 3XPL41N TO M3 WH4T’S GO1NG ON, OR WOULD YOU PR3F3R TO 3XPL41N 1T TO TH3 POL1C3?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if i told you,” said he, his accent unmistakable now that he was no longer disguising his voice.

suddenly, other figures appeared in the room. they didn’t step out of cover or anything sensible like that--they appeared out of thin air. doppelgangers of myself, pyrope, her landladies, my wife, aradia megido, and many other people both familiar and strange.

even pyrope was stunned enough to let her guard down, and that was a fatal mistake, for in an instant the doppelganger pyrope was on her. I attempted to run to her aid, but there came a sharp pain in the back of my head a--

\--nd story!John was down for the count. Seeing that story!Terezi was also down, John breathed a sigh of relief. “Well that was pretty fucking harrowing.” He tossed aside the lamp he used to knock his doppelganger out with. “Do you think they’ll be okay?”

Terezi rubbed her eyes. “No, John, they’re not going to be okay. In a few moments, they won’t exist. It would probably be kinder to just kill them.” She “looked” around the room. “It’s not too late, you know.”

But alas, no one really had the stomach for it.

Rose lifted a brazier and burned the book, for good measure. They left the ashes behind when they zapped back to reality.

i slept at baker street that night, and we were engaged upon our toast and coffee in the morning when the king of bohemia rushed into the room.

“You have really got it!” he cried, grasping sherlock holmes by either shoulder and looking eagerly into his face.

“NOT Y3T.”

“But you have hopes?”

“1 H4V3 HOP3S.”

“Then, come. I am all impatience to be gone.”

“W3 MUST H4V3 4 C4B.”

“No, my brougham is waiting.”

“TH3N TH4T W1LL S1MPL1FY M4TT3RS.” we descended and started off once more for briony lodge.

“4R4D14 M3G1DO 1S M4RR13D,” remarked pyrope.

“Married! When?”

“Y3ST3RD4Y.”

“But to whom?”

“TO 4N 3NGL1SH L4WY3R N4M3D C4PTOR.”

“But she could not love him.”

“1 4M 1N HOP3S TH4T SH3 DO3S.”

“And why in hopes?”

“B3C4US3 1T WOULD SP4R3 YOUR M4J3STY 4LL F34R OF FUTUR3 4NNOY4NC3. 1F TH3 L4DY LOV3S H3R HUSB4ND, SH3 DO3S NOT LOV3 YOUR M4J3STY. 1F SH3 DO3S NOT LOV3 YOUR M4J3STY, TH3R3 1S NO R34SON WHY SH3 SHOULD 1NT3RF3R3 W1TH YOUR M4J3STY’S PL4N.”

“It is true. And yet--! Well! I wish she had been of my own station and species! What a queen she would have made!” he relapsed into a moody silence, which was not broken until we drew up in serpentine avenue.

the door of briony lodge was open, and a white carapacian stood upon the steps. she watched us with a sardonic eye as we stepped from the brougham.

“Ms. Terezi Pyrope, I believe?” said she.

“1 4M MS. PYROP3,” answered my companion, looking at her with a questioning and rather startled gaze.

“Indeed! My mistress told me that you were likely to call. She left this morning with her husband by the 5:15 train from Charing Cross for the Continent.”

“WH4T!” terezi pyrope staggered back, white with chagrin and surprise. “DO YOU M34N TH4T SH3 H4S L3FT 3NGL4ND?”

“Never to return.”

“And the papers?” asked the King hoarsely. “All is lost.”

“W3 SH4LL S33.” she pushed past the servant and rushed into the drawing-room, followed by the king and myself. the furniture was scattered about in every direction, with dismantled shelves and open drawers, as if the lady had hurriedly ransacked them before her flight. holmes rushed at the bell-pull, tore back a small sliding shutter, and, plunging in his hand, pulled out a photograph and a letter. the photograph was of aradia megido herself in evening dress, the letter was superscribed to “terezi pyrope, esq. to be left till called for.” my friend tore it open, and we all three read it together. It was dated at midnight of the preceding night and ran in this way:

“my dear ms. terezi pyrope,--you really did it very well. you took me in completely. until after the alarm of fire, i had not a suspicion. but then, when i found how i had betrayed myself, i began to think. i had been warned against you months ago. i had been told that, if the king employed an agent, it would certainly be you. and your address had been given me. yet, with all this, you made me reveal what you wanted to know. even after i became suspicious, i found it hard to think evil of such a dear, kind old clergyman. but, you know, i have been trained as an actress myself. male costume is nothing new to me. i often take advantage of the freedom which it gives. i sent ms. paint, the coachman, to watch you, ran upstairs, got into my walking clothes, as i call them, and came down just as you departed.

“well, i followed you to your door, and so made sure that i was really an object of interest to the celebrated ms. terezi pyrpoe. then i, rather imprudently, wished you good-night, and started for the temple to see my husband.

“we both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by so formidable an antagonist; so you will find the nest empty when you call to-morrow. as to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. i love and am loved by a better man than he. the king may do what he will without hindrance from one whom he has cruelly wronged. i keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future. i leave a photograph which he might care to possess; and i remain, dear ms. terezi pyrope,

“very truly yours,

“aradia megido.”

“What a woman--oh, what a woman!” cried the king of bohemia, when we had all three read this epistle. “Did i not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”

“FROM WH4T 1 H4V3 S33N OF TH3 L4DY, SH3 S33MS, 1ND33D, TO B3 ON 4 V3RY D1FF3R3NT L3V3L TO YOUR M4J3STY,” said pyrope coldly. “1 4M SORRY TH4T 1 H4V3 NOT B33N 4BL3 TO BR1NG YOUR M4J3STY’S BUS1N3SS TO 4 MOR3 SUCC3SSFUL CONCLUS1ON.”

“On the contrary, my dear madam,” cried the king; “nothing could be more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The photograph is now as safe as if it were in the fire.”

“1 4M GL4D TO H34R YOUR M4J3STY S4Y SO.”

“I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way i can reward you. This ring--” he slipped an emerald snake ring from his finger and held it out upon the palm of his hand.

“YOUR M4J3STY H4S SOM3TH1NG WH1CH 1 SHOULD V4LU3 3V3N MOR3 H1GHLY,” said pyrope.

“You have but to name it.”

“TH1S PHOTOGR4PH!”

the king stared at her in amazement.

“Irene’s photograph!” he cried. “Certainly, if you wish it.”

“1 TH4NK YOUR M4J3STY. TH3N TH3R3 1S NO MOR3 TO B3 DON3 1N TH3 M4TT3R. 1 H4V3 TH3 HONOUR TO W1SH YOU 4 V3RY GOOD 3V3N1NG.” she bowed, and, turning away without observing the hand which the king had stretched out to her, she set off in my company for her chambers.

And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of bohemia, and how the best plans of ms terezi pyrope were beaten by a rustblood’s wit. she used to make merry over the cleverness of rustbloods, but I have not heard her do it of late. and when she speaks of aradia megido, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of _the_ rustblood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there it is. The final chapter of chapter 10. I know, it's short, but--What's that? Huge blank space taking up most of the page, you say? I have no idea what you mean.


	15. Chapter 12

Jasprose sat bolt upright in the hospital bed, startling a Dersite nurse. She took in the scene in an instant and asked, “How long have I been out?”

“Three months,” said the nurse. It had felt like so much longer.

“Do you happen to know where the council is?”

“What, the entire thing?”

“Yes.”

The nurse checked her phone. “There was a meeting the other day that hasn’t adjourned yet. An official meeting and everything.”

Jasprose got to her feet and stumbled.

“You’re not well enough to be walking.”

“Then I’ll fly,” and she flew.

Jasprose found the council chamber and ran into Davepeta, who was just returning with donuts. “Oh hey you’re alive, thank fuck.”

“Yeah. Word on the street in paradox space is that you’re accidentally creating a steampunk Alternian empire, somehow?”

“I mean, we're actually trying to create some sort of Sherlock Holmes world but with all us in it?”

Jasprose nodded sagely. “Yeah, the British Empire can justifiably be called a steampunk Alternia, so that tracks. Tell me what’s going on here.”

They entered the chamber and Davepeta told her the whole story.

“...and us sprites and Callie ended up staying behind because we would have stuck out like a sore thumb. Like even if it were worthwhile to add sprites and cherubs to that world when there’s only seven of us, it maybe wouldn’t have been possible due to what a beautiful freak of nature I am and like the only reason Callie is the way she is is that she literally cheated death, so like any Callies there would be more like the other Calliope.”

There was a flash of light and suddenly the room was full of several more people. Callie put down her book to greet her friends, but saw on their faces how dejected they looked.

“So I hear you nearly created a steampunk Alternian empire,” Jasprose said.

“How the fuck did you hear that?” Karkat demanded. “Oh, and congratulations on not being in a coma anymore.”

“Stable time loop in the ass end of paradox space. Well, I suppose it’s much closer to being the exact center of paradox space than the ass end, since it’s literally in the corona of the Green Sun...anyway. And it wasn’t a coma, I just...went exploring in my Ultimate Self and got lost. So Davepeta was just explaining to me what you all were trying to accomplish here, and good news: I have a solution, because a world like that already exists. Well, with trolls and humans, at least, but that’s better than nothing.”

~ ~ ~

Several weeks later, they were gathered in the park. “Is it weird that I’m reluctant to leave all this behind?” Rose asked.

“We’re not leaving it behind. We’ll return--to this exact moment, no less--when we’re older and wiser,” Jasprose said.

“Yeah, it’s just…”

“We’re all nervous,” Jasprose said. “It’s been so long since any of us had been allowed to just be kids that we don’t know that we know how anymore.”

“And then there’s the fact that we’re returning to societies we thought we left behind, that we’d grown out of and probably won’t fit back into; the silver lining of a dead civilization is that we no longer have to deal with the old bigotries, and now…”

“For what it’s worth, they’re relatively chill from what I’ve seen,” Jasprose said. “Certainly compared to post-scratch Earth or Alternia under the Condesce.”

“And what a high bar that is,” Rose said dryly.

“Hey, are you two going to kiss or can we just get on with this?” Karkat shouted from the circle of kids.

The Roses joined the circle, and everyone held hands. They held Jasprose’ description of their destination in their minds, glowed, turned into pure white light, and disappeared.

For a second the park was empty. And then there appeared several humanoid forms of white light, which turned into flesh and blood forms; the kids had returned, but they were kids no longer.

~ ~ ~

They appeared in John’s yard at night. The only proof that this wasn’t John’s childhood home was that in the night sky there was only a single star. Caedisol, Alternia’s sun.

“Hey, guys, I found a note,” Dave said.

_ hey dave its me future dave that is to say future you so how about you do me a solid and transport your friends to the year 2025 also yeah i know what youre thinking (wow its almost like i _ _ was _ _ you or some shit) its like damn were doing this stable time loop bullshit again and well yeah we are but dont worry its a lot less hostile now that we dont have an alpha timeline to worry about giving a shit about well we kind of do but we made it ourselves long story but the point is dont worry about it its smooth sailing from here on out well at least until you become me i can guarantee nothing about whatll happen when we return to earth c long story short 2025 go now where making this happen _

“Well there we have it, let’s all grab hands and go on a second magical journey in as many minutes,” Dave said.

Dave’s powers were a qualitatively different experience to John’s powers. Where everything had blinked out of existence when John had transported them here, with Dave the world was still there, it had just gone into fast forward. It took him a minute to get to it up to the speed where the sun and moon were streaks across the sky, and shortly after that they suddenly stopped.

They were surrounded by older versions of themselves.

“Are you future-us?” Dave asked.

“Nah,” (Dave) said. “We’re the native versions of y’alls. Just a bunch of mortal doofuses with no special powers.”

John looked around the crowd. “Hey, where’s me? And whose that?” he pointed at an unfamiliar woman.

“No one tell him; this’ll be hilarious,” (June) said.

“No, it won’t because he’s _never_ going to get it, because the only person in the worlds who is more unbelievably dense than _June _ Egbert is _John_ Egbert,” (Karkat) retorted. “After an hour it’s just going to be sad, like watching a blind puppy run into the wall over and over again when the door is just a few feet to the left.

“John, she _is_ you, you dope.”

“What, like that episode of Sliders where Quinn’s double was female?” John asked.

“God damn it John don’t embarrass us; first of all that’s not how the ectobiology that created us works, and secondly you know from Jasprose’s story that the version of you from this timeline ‘was’ a boy named John,” Dave said.

“But then...how…?”

“Seriously?” (Karkat) asked. “What do you want, a doctor’s note? Very well; I, Sir Mister Doctor Lord Karkat Vantas, Esquire, MD, PhD, ScD, BFA, DDiv, a bunch of other meaningless bullshit titles...diagnose you with trans.” He performed the sign of the cross on John, or rather, in his general direction. “Go forth, my child, and cis no more.”

“...Huh.”

Karkat waved his hand in front of John’s face. “I think you broke him. Er, her?”

“You should probably stick with ‘him’ until he says otherwise,” (June) said.

“This is just a lot to process,” said John quietly.

“Take your time,” said (Rose).

Then a man came out of the house carrying a freshly baked cake. A familiar man, older than John remembered yet unmistakable. Tears came to John’s eyes unbidden, and he ran. The man was wrapped in a hug and his cake fell to the ground, ruined and unnoticed.

“I’ve missed you so much, Dad; I’ve missed you so, so much.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a satisfying conclusion to the story...what's that? There's another chapter after this? Oh, dear.


	16. Epilogue

A few months later their lives had settled down and were almost...normal. Such a strange thought, after all this time. They had a lot of schooling to catch up on, and many of them had never been properly socialized in the first place. Dave was being raised by the older version of himself rather than (Bro), quite wisely, and the trolls had similar arrangements out of necessity. Dirk was also a ward of the native (Dave’s). Jane’s dad had gotten a job and so they were doing fine, even if they were no longer spectacularly wealthy. Davepeta was living with (Nepeta), Jade and Jake were both wards of the native Jade’s, who was also taking care of her post-centennial (grandpa) (who was still alive through the miracle of Alternian medicine), John was living with his (dad), and Rose, Roxy, and Jasprose were all wards of Rose’s (mom), who seemed delighted by her new “triplets”.

Rose lay atop the roof of her new house, staring at the pitch darkness of the starless sky. She couldn’t explain why she knew, but she knew: tonight was the night. “Are you there, God? It’s me, Rose,” she intoned sarcastically.

Her palmhusk rang, and she checked it. An unknown number had texted her the message:

_ Normally I don’t do this kind of thing, but sure, ask your questions. _

“Then why are you doing it now?” Rose asked, looking around for any way in which she might be being spied on.

Another text: _To close out the narrative._

“So then we _are_ in a narrative?”

_No._

“And here you said you were going to give me answers.”

_Technically I did no such thing, and you should really know better than to make that assumption after your dealings with Doc Scratch. But like his bullshit about lies of omission not existing (can I give you all the information about a situation? No. Can I give you enough _relevant_ information to allow you to make an informed choice? Of course), that is weaseling._

_Narratives are powerful things in the World of Ideas, which make them useful and versatile tools in a reality where that realm predominates over the physical, but at the end of the day, they're not _actually_ real. Harry Potter has no more sophonce than a table does, doing nothing that isn't dictated by either J.K. Rowling or a fanfic author/fanartist. The guys who made Warhammer 40K aren’t uncaring gods. And you aren’t going to burn in whatever Hell you believe in for what you’ve done to poor, sweet Calmasis and their friends. Pretending fiction is real is an interesting way to interact with it, and authors can allegorically be compared to gods, but that’s all it is--allegory. Metaphor. Make-believe._

“And yet, there _is_ a narrative?”

_Think of the author as an exile. He (in this case) does the things that make it possible for the time loops to go smoothly and many other things. Hussie’s author insert couldn’t have existed if he hadn’t written _Homestuck_. J. Egbert’s powers only work within the context of a narrative, as you yourself deduced. And I couldn’t have manipulated Hussie’s puppet into sending you the link to his webcomic without first manipulating the hand of an author into saying I did that._

“So you’re not the author?”

_Don’t be too disappointed by that. I know that’s where this narrative seemed to be heading, inasmuch as it seemed to be heading anywhere, but do you really want to have a conversation with someone who fundamentally doesn’t believe you are real? It would have been a farcical thing._

“What are you, then?”

_As a strict materialist, the author finds the idea of a reality in which the World of Ideas predominates over the physical realm an absurdity. Ideas, after all, are things that are made in the brain--a physical object. He finds our reality to be distinctly unnatural, and so his fan theory is that it is artificial--and this, you see, implies the existence of a creator._

_You _did_ ask to speak to God, after all._

“And you are she?”

_Perhaps. Or perhaps I am a soulless construct not unlike the orange man. Maybe there is no “I” at all. You will never know._

“What does that last one even mean?”

_You’ll find out soon enough._

And she would; at this moment, the rest of the Earth C crew were getting random gibberish from your internet sent to their phones and computers, the result of damage to Hussie’s typewriter, floating somewhere out there in the furthest ring. Mechanically speaking, she was too--it’s just that the “random” snippets of text she was getting were being copied from this very page. The Alpha Timeline can do amazing things with the “monkeys, Shakespeare, et cetera” principle.

_Anyway, the story as it exists in the author’s head is--actually, I’m just going to copy and paste “my” dialog from one of his previous drafts:  
_

_“Have you ever stopped to think about the nature of God? As in, the deistic creator god. Riddle me this: if such a creature could come into existence through natural means, why not others of its kind? Could not part of the purpose such a creature might have in creating a world be to show off to its peers? Could its peers not then seek to imitate its works? Or to look at it in another light: if you have a computer that can simulate a universe, could you not then download that universe into another, similar computer?”_

_And you can believe however much of that as you like. The author thinks of that as an allegory for a fanfiction author’s relationship to a canon author; I'm supposed to claim that in fact it is the other way around, of course--something else you can believe if you like--b__ut it’s funny how these characters take on a life of their own once you start writing them. Almost as though I were _actually_ the one pulling the strings here...isn’t it, SMJB?_

Rose made a mental note to look up this SMJB later and see if she might find the narrative she was currently in.

_Don’t bother; [I’ll give you the link](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21215771/chapters/50508752). Please wait until we finish here to click on it; it’s rude, and also transcribing this conversation will become hell for the author if you start reading ahead in it._

“I suppose sating my curiosity can wait.”

_Anyway, that’s also the reason for various inconsistencies between your life and _Homestuck_. Transcription errors are going to pop up when you’re downloading an omniverse._

“Sounds like you have a really shitty streaming service.”

_One little webcomic in the ass end of paradox space getting a handful of details wrong doesn’t strike me as unreasonable, considering the “file size” involved._

“Oh. For some reason, I thought we were the ones in error.”

_Gotta remember that you’re not literally fictional. Not that that would have been a much greater error; what’s a thousand orders of magnitude on this scale?_

“And what of that Sherlock Holmes world we created? Was it fictional or not?”

_ Firstly, you aborted the ritual two thirds of the way through, so who can say whether or not it would have worked? Secondly, though, you are (lowercase-g) _ gods_, even those of you who are not god tier _ per se_; bending the universe to your will is your _ thing_. _

“The universe doesn’t seem to bend to my will overmuch.”

_ The thing is that paradox space doesn’t give you what you want in a monkey’s paw manner to be cruel, it does so because more often than not your will’s being opposed by the wills of other gods and it’s forced to find a way to satisfy both. _

_ Look at the world you’re on right now. You willed it to be that way. _

Rose’s eyes widened and her hand trembled.

_ Oh, relax, you’re not mind controlling anyone. But throughout that pocket dimension’s history, the good guys have just so happened to have all the luck and the bad guys have just so happened to have none of it--not even counting the multiple times you’ve/you’ll used/use time travel to interfere with history (spoiler alert; you’ll do quite a bit of it). There isn’t really enough substance to that dimension to support multiple branching timelines, and whenever the quantum wave collapses you’ve simply been picking the best possible outcome._

“So Bill Clinton being eviscerated by a subjugulator on national television was a stroke of fortune?” Rose asked sardonically.

_ In the grand scheme of things, yes; it prevented a political party of increasingly violent and lunatic reactionaries from taking power at the worst possible time. The Candy Timeline is positively tame compared to some of the things that could have happened where you are right now. _

“And when the story ends, we don’t fade to black?”

_ Of course not. That doesn’t happen to real people. The billions of people on those worlds you’ve got there don’t not exist simply because no one is narrating their pedestrian lives. Any other questions before we wrap this up?_

“Let’s go with one of the classics: why do bad things happen to good people?”

_ Because people would figure out the rules of the game proper quick if only saints ever won the lottery and only sinners ever got struck by lightning. _

_ Goodbye, Rose. _

_ PS: _

_ The End. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it's very brave and sexy of me to claim that where Forewarned and Homestuck disagree it's Homestuck that's wrong, especially since I'm so fucking trash at character voices. Y'all didn't want it and it's my canon now, lmao.
> 
> Seriously though, the thing about Homestuck is that its reality contains the fact that it is a story, and this is a fundamental problem for those of us who believe in realism, because that is an absurd statement. But it has to be accounted for in any examination of Homestuck's lore, because it is true.
> 
> And yet, there's one thing all stories have: an author. They are created things, and so the reality of homestuck is also a created thing, and if authors are metaphorically gods--creating and destroying worlds at a whim--then Gods can metaphorically be authors. Andrew Hussie's self-insert is literally the avatar of the creator of all things.
> 
> Which solves a couple problems for me. For one thing as my narrator so kindly pointed out the idea of the World of Ideas being more real than the physical world is absurd (what is it built on? What are its atoms and molecules and quarks?), but if you create a world in a simulation it can be like anything you want it to be like. For another, taking the idea at face value would be a drag. Can you imagine a world where every horrible and depressing fiction anyone ever dreamed up was real? Warhammer 40K? Victoria? Left Behind? And if those worlds are real, there are people in them writing even more depressing shit, because the world could always be worse, you know....
> 
> Another thing that makes me uncomfortable about it is that by accepting the premise that Homestuck is a story in-universe--one that the characters are aware of and can manipulate--you're making the argument that fiction is real. Actually believing that is a sign of mental illness, you know. By forcing the narrative to conclude, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that it is not a narrative and that these people are real, I am in fact arguing that they are fake.
> 
> Anyway, I'm going to wait a week before publishing anything else in this universe because that's how long it'll be until our heroes lose all connection to our internet (better act quick to save anything worth preserving, Rose!).
> 
> So yeah, that was Forewarned, the fic that examines, but ultimately rejects the legitimacy of, the very conceit underpinning all of Homestuck.


End file.
